**6. Conclusions**

In the context of the world's call for "peak carbon" and "carbon neutral" efforts, China is faced with the choice between economic development and environmental protection. In addition, China's rapid urbanization as a developing country has led to problems such as inefficient land use. Under these conditions, the Chinese governmen<sup>t</sup> is adjusting its approach to development and transforming itself into an innovative powerhouse. Therefore, after years of transformation and development, are China's prosperous regions able to alleviate the conflict between economy and environment? Exploring the spatiotemporal evolution patterns of land economic efficiency and environmental pollution, and the interrelationship between the two, is an important guide to promote the synergistic development of land use efficiency, economic development and environmental governance. Using data from 84 prefecture-level cities and municipalities directly under the central governmen<sup>t</sup> in eastern China from 2011–2017, this study measures the relative levels of land economic efficiency through the entropy method and plots the spatio-temporal evolution of carbon emissions and land economic efficiency to analyze the spatio-temporal characteristics of the two. Based on this, the study further identifies the relationship between land economic efficiency and carbon emissions through a general panel model, and obtains some insights on how to reconcile economic, land and environmental development.

The conclusions are as follows:


Based on the above, this study can provide some inspiration for policy making:

(1) China has been implementing a sustainable development and innovation strategy for many years, and is now seeing results. Eastern China's prosperous region is already moving closer to the goal of synergistic economic–environmental–land development, and has stepped off the path of socialist economic development with Chinese characteristics. The findings of this study provide support for the validity of China's economic policies and environmental regulation policies.


Prospects and shortcomings of this study include, first, that environmental pollution problems often have spatial effects, but they have not been studied here. Second, due to the type of data, there is still much room for improvement in the evaluation system of land economic efficiency. Thirdly, due to the limitation of space and the research purpose, this study only includes the prefecture-level cities in eastern China as a whole, and lacks a more detailed study of a particular province.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, B.C. and L.C.; formal analysis, B.C. and L.C.; methodology, B.C.; writing—review and editing, B.C. and L.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Data Availability Statement:** Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. These data can be found here: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1eUHhvDqcxy9E30e7rjMqqw/Extraction (accessed on 1 June 2021) code: land.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
