The Impact of Compact Urban Management on Environmental Quality: Evidence from Chinese Cities

Periods of decentralization had exerted a tremendous pressure on the cities environmentsustainability. The compact city concept was seen as an approach that could end "the evil of urban sprawl". This paper uses GDP density as the index of compact city to examine the determinants of environment sustainability in China using a spatial econometric framework. The results confirm that pollution is positively affected by pollution in nearby cities. Investigations of the determinants of environment sustainability that ignore this spatial relationship are likely to be mis-specified. Considering the spatial effect, the statistical significant inverted U-shaped curves are found in the estimation of the impact of GDP density on the pollution. It illustrates that city's pollution will be decreased with the compact urban development.