Industrial structure, urban governance and haze pollution: Spatiotemporal evidence from China

As a negative external product of China's rapid development, haze pollution has seriously affected the quality of economic development and people's quality of life. This paper firstly explores the important reasons for the uncoordinated industrial structure caused by haze pollution, and puts forward the purpose of promoting the adjustment of industrial structure through urban governance in order to tackle with the urgent problem of haze pollution. Using panel data from 287 cities in China, this paper analyzes the relationship among industrial structure, urban governance and haze pollution using the Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) model. The innovations are: (1) this paper focuses on the topic of industrial structure, urban governance and haze pollution simultaneously. (2) this paper uses the method of GTWR to comprehensively consider the spatial and temporal tendency at the same time. (3) Conclusions are helpful to provide targeted policy recommendations. And the results show that: (1) the spatial clustering characteristics of haze pollution are very prominent, and have been suppressed to a certain extent under the measures of urban governance; (2) the spatial and temporal differences of industrial structure on haze pollution are large; (3) corporate governance plays an important role in slowing down haze pollution; (4) in public governance, the green coverage rate of built-up areas, the innocuous disposal rate of domestic garbage and the increase of public transport will have a negative impact on haze pollution, while highly concentrated urban population, high level of economic development, large number of industrial enterprises above designated size, and increased thermal power generation capacity will increase the degree of haze pollution; (5) cities with steadily decreasing of the proportion of the secondary industry, the proportion of the tertiary industry, the comprehensive treatment rate of industrial solid materials, the green coverage rate of the built-up area and the industrial enterprises above designated size are mainly lie in southeastern China, respectively; and cities with decline in innocuous disposal rate of domestic garbage are concentrated in the western region, while cities with significant changes of the number of buses per unit are mainly distributed in the northeastern region, the other variables are not obvious.