The improvement of green economic efficiency (GEE) should be realized under reasonable urban land development intensity (ULDI). Improving GEE can also help alleviate the negative externalities of excessive or unreasonable ULDI. Clarifying the interactive response mechanism between GEE and ULDI is a key link in regional sustainable development. Therefore, this paper uses the super-efficiency slack-based model (SBM) method, panel entropy method, and panel vector auto regression model to comprehensively analyze the interactive response relationship between GEE and ULDI in 283 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2019. This paper finds that: (1) during the research period, both the GEE and ULDI showed a relatively obvious upward trend, which is manifested in the fact that ULDI increased year by year while GEE overall increased in volatility. The growth and evolution trend of ULDI and GEE has the characteristics of interaction and coordination; (2) there is a two-way interactive Granger causality between ULDI and GEE, showing a positive interactive response effect; and (3) both ULDI and GEE have positive inertial growth and self-enhancement mechanisms. In the long run, GEE has a greater impact on the change of ULDI.
Keywords: green economic efficiency; interactive response; urban land development intensity.