行政区划调整与生态效应：来自中国的证据

摘要

As urbanization accelerates worldwide, the ecological consequences of administrative boundary reforms remain poorly understood. This study exploits China's County-to-District reform as a quasi-natural experiment to estimate its impact on vegetation cover, using a county-level panel from 2008 to 2020 and a staggered difference-in-differences design. The reform significantly reduces local vegetation cover, with attenuated effects in counties characterized by steeper slopes, greater topographic relief, designated nature reserves, or higher fiscal expenditure. Mechanism analysis reveals a development-oriented political economy channel: the reform intensifies socioeconomic activity, which in turn reshapes land use through built-up expansion and cropland contraction. Evidence from the primary land market corroborates this channel, showing that the reform increases primary land conveyance revenue mainly through commercial and industrial land conveyances. These findings underscore the need to incorporate ecological and fiscal assessments into reform approval procedures and to decouple administrative upgrading from land supply expansion, so that institutional transitions do not come at the expense of long-term environmental quality.