Dynamics of land use efficiency with ecological intercorrelation in regional development

Arguments about side effects of economic growth in urbanization call for deeper research on land use efficiency (LUE) from the perspective of urban planning for the coordination of social production and environmental conservation. Rural-urban migration increases rural household earning from part-time jobs at urban area. This social transformation increases the transportation demands and the risk of regional environmental degradation through ecological intercorrelation among urban-rural ecosystems. In this research, we aim to study how urban-rural ecological intercorrelation can dynamically determine the edge effects between backward-wave effects and spillover effects to affect dynamics of land use efficiency on the pathway of regional development. We analyze the marginal percentage changes of population growth and rural/urban income growth influence the dynamics of land use efficiency of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region (BTH). Empirical analysis results show that the urban income rises have weak spillover effects, while rural income growth primarily influences land use efficiency changes when urban-rural ecological intercorrelation is weak. We also test with or without the innovation impacts, and find both methods reporting the violation of normal economic development that in fact backward-wave effects exceed spillover effects in BTH. It implies that urban income growth should drive more spillover effects when urban-rural ecological intercorrelation is strong, but in fact it fails in a highly urbanized region. Thus, it is debatable that the fast population growth is the root of environmental degradation, in fact, ecological intercorrelation determines the edge effects of regional economic scale. That affects the structural effects of urban-rural landscape changes being allocated by population and income rises dynamically. Policy implication for regional development is to identify landscape rights in advance to keep dynamics of land use efficiency in a relatively stable structure for coherently improving environmental quality and the standard of living.