Industrial agglomeration and environmental pollution: Evidence from China under New Urbanization

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of industrial agglomeration on environmental pollution under the New Urbanization in China. The paper constructs and expands an equilibrium model that includes industrial agglomeration and pollution control factors to analyze the mechanism. Meanwhile, by applying urbanization as the threshold variable, the threshold model is used to study the relationship between industrial agglomeration and environmental pollution under different urbanization levels. Important estimated results are as follows. When the New Urbanization level is lower than 46.6%, the coefficient of the effect of industrial agglomeration on environmental pollution is 0.7153. When the New Urbanization level is between 46.6% and 74.9%, the impact coefficient decreases to 0.3127, whereas when the level of the New Urbanization is higher than 74.9%, the impact changes substantially with -0.1617 as its coefficient. Thus, the relationship between industrial agglomeration and environmental pollution is not a simple linear relationship, but has an inversed-U type characteristic of nonlinear relationship.