Accessibility to transportation is a crucial factor for economic growth. Transportation land, defined as the land used to support transportation infrastructure, such as city and inter-city rail, ports, and air travel, is a critical element for constructing transportation facilities and has attracted increasing attention from researchers and policy makers. Transportation land transfer (TLT) is defined as the act by which the state transfers transportation land-use rights to a land user (collective or individual) within a certain period of time as the land owner (all land in China is owned by the state). The land user pays a land-use right transfer fee to the state. This article first reveals the multidimensional effect between TLT and economic growth based on data from China’s 30 provinces for 2007–2019. The study found the following. (1) A continuous increase in the availability of transportation land is vital to ensure sustainable economic growth, and the construction of transportation land between adjacent areas has positive spatial spillover effects. (2) These positive effects work through three mechanisms, i.e., increased employment, industrial interactions, and improvements in economic operational efficiency, with a time lag. (3) The positive effects of TLT on economic growth have significant heterogeneous moderating effects on the differences in the economic development stage, the level of industrial structure, and urbanization rate. The study expands the front-end to back-end analysis of land use, provides a reference for countries and regions at different stages of development to promote economic growth using transportation land construction, and presents beneficial insights for governments to efficiently avoid the mismatch of transportation land resources.

This study attempts to measure the drag effect of carbon emissions on China’s economic growth by incorporating carbon emissions as an endogenous variable into an economic growth model and by relaxing the assumption that the size of the economy will remain unchanged. The drag effect of carbon emissions on the process of urbanisation is derived based on the intrinsic relationship between economic growth and urban development. Then, unit root and cointegration tests are performed using panel data from 30 provincial regions in Mainland China from 2003 to 2016 to prove and estimate the resistance caused by carbon emission in the process of urbanisation. Results show that the drag effect of carbon emission between 2003 and 2016 has a certain negative impact on the process of urbanisation in China. Due to the constraints of carbon emissions, the growth rate of China’s economic growth and urbanization level is 0.74% and 4.96% lower than that without constraints, respectively. Therefore, in the process of rapid urbanisation, formulating a reasonable carbon emission reduction strategy by the provincial government is conducive to the healthy and sustainable development of urbanisation.

Using spatial econometric analysis technique, the spatial weight matrix constructed according to the geographical features of the sample cities, and the spatial lag model (SLM) and spatial error model (SEM) based on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), this paper empirically investigates the spatial autocorrelation and the socioeconomic influential factors of urban carbon emissions in China through data of 280 cities in 2013. The research shows that urban carbon emissions in China is significant positive spatial autocorrelation; and the relationship between GDP and urban carbon emission is N type curve, which shows the environmental Kuznets (EKC) curve of the inverted U is not existence at the present stage of urban carbon emission; In addition, the secondary on urban carbon emissions is not significant and negative correlation. While the amount of motor vehicles, the foreign investment and the urban population have significant and positive influences on urban carbon emission. As a result, a series of comprehensive measures in both social and economic aspects as well as the regional coordination of environmental policies are needed to reduce urban carbon emission.