Post Date: 30 June 2026

Policy Signal and Industrial Land Allocation: The Spillover Effect of China's Blue Bay Remediation Action

Abstract:

The Blue Bay Remediation Action is one of the largest marine ecological restoration policies in China. Whether its impact extends beyond the scope of ecological restoration and reaches the land market is an important question that needs to be answered. This research uses China's land transfer data from 2010 to 2024, and takes 2016 as the policy intervention year. It innovatively uses the distance from land parcels to the nearest Blue Bay project and the distance from land parcels to the coastline as the treatment group and control group in the difference-in-differences model, and examines the spillover effect of the policy as a spatially explicit policy signal on the allocation of industrial land. Empirical results show that for the first batch of pilot cities, within the same city, a 10‑km increase in distance from the nearest project reduces the probability of industrial land transfer by 7.55 percentage points, an effect primarily driven by eco‑friendly industries. When examining the situation across administrative boundaries, a 10‑km increase in distance raises the industrial land transfer probability by 0.68 percentage points, with non-eco-friendly industries tend to be located in areas far from the boundaries of the pilot cities. This research verifies the mechanism of policy signals and administrative boundaries on policy spillover, provides evidence for the coexistence of the Porter Hypothesis and the Pollution Haven Hypothesis in the context of marine ecological restoration policy in China, and offers empirical references for optimization of marine and coastal environmental regulations.