Regional allocation of industrial land in industrializing China: does spatial mismatch exist?

Abstract Understanding how industrial land is spatially allocated across regions is crucial for formulating more optimised land policies and regional development strategies, especially in industrialising countries. By exploiting a unique county-level cadastral dataset covering the whole China from 2009 to 2018, this paper analyzes the spatiotemporal allocation of industrial land and the potential spatial mismatch in China. We find that industrial land constituted the largest single type of urban land use in China (27%) and its absolute area and allocative share expanded during the period 2009–2018. Both the incremental and the stock of the industrial land were mainly concentrated in the coastal metropolitan regions but with a greater tendency to allocate more industrial land in inland regions. Further, we provide robust evidence of the existence of a spatial mismatch of industrial land allocation across Chinese counties, although the efficiency of regional allocations did not deteriorate over time.