Effects of urban sprawl on haze pollution in China based on dynamic spatial Durbin model during 2003–2016

As one of the undesirable outcomes in the process of urbanization and industrialization, haze pollution in China would undoubtedly be affected by urban sprawl. Hence, studying the effects of urban sprawl on haze pollution at the national level has great theoretical and practical meanings for the sustainable development of Chinese cities in the long run. Based on the panel data of 285 prefecture-level and above cities during 2003–2016, this paper has tried to employ a dynamic spatial Durbin model under the space-and-time fixed effect to analysis how haze pollution is affected by urban sprawl in China. The results revealed that the relationship between urban sprawl and haze pollution shows a U-shaped curve in large cities but an inverted U-shaped curve in small and medium-sized cities, which provides a clear evidence for the spatial shift risk of haze pollution caused by urban sprawl amongst different sizes of cities. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal dependences have significantly deteriorated the haze pollution in China, while the spatiotemporal dependence has to some extent inhibited the concentration of haze pollution, thus the effective control of haze pollution should rely on the joint governance in space and the cyclic accumulation in time simultaneously.