As China entered marketization in the late 1980s, it soon established a market economy system and implemented tax-sharing reforms. Driven by the marketization, local governments have rapidly developed the economy under the pressure of fiscal competition caused by the reform of the tax-sharing system. Industrial land is an important factor of local economic development, and it enables local governments to invest heavily in the industrial sector to promote economic development, leading to urban expansion. In order to shed light on the relationship between the market reforms implemented by the Chinese government and the expansion of urban industrial land, this paper used the data of 77 prefecture-level cities in China’s five national-level urban agglomerations as research samples from 2007 to 2018. We first constructed the marketization rate of industrial land (MIL) and used the panel data model to examine whether China′s market reform will curb the expansion of industrial land. The results showed that: (1) land market reform can restrain the scale of industrial land expansion, and the impact is different in different urban agglomerations; (2) under the effect of marketization, foreign direct investment (FDI) has restrained the expansion of industrial land to a certain extent. The amount of industrial investment (AII), the ratio of secondary industry to GDP structure (RSG), and the number of industrial enterprises (NIE) will aggravate the expansion of industrial land. We suggest that the Chinese government should deepen the reform of land marketization and develop a differentiated land market mechanism. It is also necessary for local governments to develop stock land, improve the efficiency of industrial land use, increase the investment in advanced technology, and improve the intensive utilization of industrial land. The research provides a reference for other countries in the world that are developing in a transitional period to restrain unlimited land expansion and save land resources in the process of economic development.

The Chinese government is committed to its goal of building a resource-saving and environmentally friendly society (RES). The hope is that establishing an RES will accelerate social and economic development, improve resource utilization, and transform industrialization. This paper focuses on the Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan urban agglomeration (CZTUA) in Hunan Province, which is a pilot for the RES, as an example. A slack-based measure model based on data envelopment analysis was used to evaluate industrial land use efficiency (ILUE), which includes undesirable outputs. We collected panel data from 2003 to 2018 and used the difference-in-differences method to investigate whether the ILUE in the CZTUA has improved since the implementation of the RES in 2007. The results showed that: (1) the ILUE in the CZTUA increased from 0.25 in 2003 to 0.48 in 2018; (2) from 2007 to 2018, the establishment of the RES increased the ILUE in the CZTUA by 24.6%; (3) gross domestic product and the secondary industry structure ratio had key roles in improving the ILUE in the CZTUA; (4) there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic development and the ILUE in the CZTUA; (5) since the establishment of the RES, the pollution emission index of the CZTUA has clearly decreased each year. These findings not only provide a reference for the Chinese government for following up the formation of the RES and its promotion in other regions of China, but may also contribute to sustainable economic development in other transitional countries in the world.

This research aimed to investigate whether transformation of the industrial sector in a region could improve industrial land use efficiency. Taking the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in China as the research area, we compiled socioeconomic panel data from 2000 to 2020 in order to analyze the impact of the transformation of industrial sectors in an area on industrial land use efficiency from two dimensions: industrial structural optimization and industrial spatial layout. The research results show the following: (1) The rationalization and upgrading of the industrial sector, as well as the professional agglomeration of industry and diversified industrial agglomeration, have improved the efficiency of industrial land use. (2) The impact of industrial rationalization on industrial land use efficiency presents an inverted U-shaped curve, whereby the impact of industrial upgrading on industrial land use efficiency has a relatively small spatiotemporal heterogeneity. The spatiotemporal changes in the impact of industrial specialized agglomeration on industrial land use efficiency are relatively small, while the spatiotemporal changes in the impact of industrial diversified agglomeration on industrial land use efficiency are more obvious. (3) There is obvious spatial heterogeneity in the two dimensions industrial structural optimization and industrial spatial layout in the three sub-regions when improving industrial land use efficiency.