1 3
representative views: The first view holds that industrial
agglomeration is conducive to improving energy effi-
ciency. Liu etal. (2017) found that industrial agglomera-
tion can effectively promote the improvement of energy
efficiency through the empirical analysis based on 285
cities panel data from 2004 to 2013. The research results
of Wang etal. (2020b) showed that industrial agglomera-
tion can significantly promote the improvement of trans-
portation infrastructure on energy efficiency. The second
view holds that industrial agglomeration does not always
have a positive impact on energy efficiency, and may even
have a certain negative impact. Peng etal. (2015) found
that industrial agglomeration has no significant impact
on energy efficiency through quantitative analysis of the
influencing factors of energy efficiency of China’s chemi-
cal fiber industry. Han etal. (2018) found that industrial
specialization and diversified agglomeration can signifi-
cantly reduce the energy efficiency of surrounding cities.
The third view holds that there is a nonlinear relationship
between industrial agglomeration and energy efficiency.
Shi and Shen (2013) showed that enterprise agglomera-
tion led by market mechanism can significantly improve
energy efficiency, but due to the “free rider” tendency of
government intervention and environmental governance,
industrial agglomeration and energy efficiency show a
U-shaped change. The results of Zheng and Lin (2018)
showed that there is a threshold effect on the impact of
industrial agglomeration on energy efficiency. Only when
the industrial agglomeration degree reaches a certain level
(the location quotient is greater than 0.5447), the indus-
trial agglomeration can have a positive impact on energy
efficiency (the agglomeration degree is increased by 1%,
and the dynamic energy efficiency is increased by at least
0.23%). Zhao and Lin (2019) also found that there is a
threshold effect on the impact of industrial agglomeration
on total factor energy efficiency.
In summary, the existing studies have made some
achievements, but there are still spaces for further study: (1)
Most of the existing studies focus on analyzing the impact
of single industrial agglomeration on energy efficiency, such
as manufacturing agglomeration or service agglomeration.
However, in reality, industrial activities are more manifested
in the phenomenon of co-agglomeration among different
industries. Therefore, it is necessary to explore energy effi-
ciency from the perspective of industrial co-agglomeration.
Moreover, most of the existing literature studies the impact
on the energy efficiency in the local region, but it is less to
further introduce the geographical distance weight matrix
and use the spatial econometric analysis method to explore
the spatial spillover effect of industrial co-agglomeration
on energy efficiency in the surrounding regions. (2) There
is no consensus on the influence mechanism and effect of
industrial co-agglomeration on energy efficiency, and the
existing studies mainly focus on the analysis of the impact of
industrial co-agglomeration on energy efficiency in a given
period; however, it ignores the inter-temporal energy techni-
cal change and the inter-temporal energy technology bound-
ary movement, which is to say that there is a lack of in-depth
research on the impact of industrial co-agglomeration on
total factor energy efficiency. (3) The existing research is
relatively lacking analysis on the possible differences of the
impact of industrial co-agglomeration on energy efficiency
between different regions, namely that, there is a lack of
in-depth study on the possible regional heterogeneity of the
impact of industrial co-agglomeration on energy efficiency.
What’s more important, green technological innovation is
an important driving force for promoting the improvement
of energy efficiency, improving economic quality and effi-
ciency, and green transformation and upgrading. However,
the existing literature lacks a further discussion on whether
industrial co-agglomeration will have a mediating effect
through green technological innovation, which indirectly
affects energy efficiency.
In view of these deficiencies, the contribution of this
paper is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: (1)
Different from the measurement model of single industrial
agglomeration degree, the location entropy method is used
to measure the agglomeration degree of manufacturing
(
) and producer services (
) respectively, and
then a measurement model of producer services and manu-
facturing industrial co-agglomeration is constructed based
on the difference of agglomeration indicators. Moreover, the
spatial weight matrix is further introduced to construct the
spatial panel econometric model of the impact of industrial
co-agglomeration on energy efficiency, so as to investigate
the spatial spillover effect of industrial co-agglomeration on
energy efficiency in the surrounding regions. (2) Different
from the traditional simple empirical analysis, this paper
first takes industrial co-agglomeration as the main variable
into the analysis framework of affecting energy efficiency
and deeply analyzes the internal mechanism of the impact
of industrial co-agglomeration on energy efficiency. On this
basis, a more reasonable econometric model of the impact
of industrial co-agglomeration on energy efficiency is con-
structed. Moreover, based on the framework of “total-fac-
tor,” the undesired output caused by energy use is included
into the measurement model of energy efficiency, so as to
solve the problem of “environmental pollution endogenous.”
At the same time, based on the perspective of “dynamic
productivity,” the Malmquist-Luenberger index model con-
sidering undesired output with non-radial and non-angle is
further used to measure total factor energy efficiency, so
as to comprehensively analyze the deep-seated reasons of
the impact of industrial co-agglomeration on energy effi-
ciency. (3) Different from the existing studies that have less
explored the impact of industrial co-agglomeration on total
62478 Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2022) 29:62475–62494