Total factor productivity of urban land use in China

Previous studies pay little attention to the role of technological progress in measuring urban land use efficiency, and ignore the interactions among total factor productivity, technological progress, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency in the process of urban land use. To narrow the gaps, this research uses the Malmquist index approach to measure and decompose urban land use total factor productivity and a panel vector autoregressive model (PVAR) to investigate the interactions among urban land use total factor productivity, technological progress, pure technical efficiency, and scale efficiency in China from 2003 to 2016. This study shows that the overall urban land use efficiency increased at an annual growth rate of 0.7% in China from 2003 to 2016 while the growth rate of urban land use efficiency has generally decreased, which is reflected by the total factor productivity of urban land use. The total factor productivity fluctuates between 0.952 and 1.083 with a downward trend in 2003–2016. Technological progress, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency all have positive effects on the improvement of urban land use efficiency, and there are differences in the order and degree of promotion. The improvement of scale efficiency is the most important measure to ensure the efficient use of urban land resources in the future.