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As China entered marketization in the late 1980s, it soon established a market economy system and implemented tax-sharing reforms. Driven by the marketization, local governments have rapidly developed the economy under the pressure of fiscal competition caused by the reform of the tax-sharing system. Industrial land is an important factor of local economic development, and it enables local governments to invest heavily in the industrial sector to promote economic development, leading to urban expansion. In order to shed light on the relationship between the market reforms implemented by the Chinese government and the expansion of urban industrial land, this paper used the data of 77 prefecture-level cities in China’s five national-level urban agglomerations as research samples from 2007 to 2018. We first constructed the marketization rate of industrial land (MIL) and used the panel data model to examine whether China′s market reform will curb the expansion of industrial land. The results showed that: (1) land market reform can restrain the scale of industrial land expansion, and the impact is different in different urban agglomerations; (2) under the effect of marketization, foreign direct investment (FDI) has restrained the expansion of industrial land to a certain extent. The amount of industrial investment (AII), the ratio of secondary industry to GDP structure (RSG), and the number of industrial enterprises (NIE) will aggravate the expansion of industrial land. We suggest that the Chinese government should deepen the reform of land marketization and develop a differentiated land market mechanism. It is also necessary for local governments to develop stock land, improve the efficiency of industrial land use, increase the investment in advanced technology, and improve the intensive utilization of industrial land. The research provides a reference for other countries in the world that are developing in a transitional period to restrain unlimited land expansion and save land resources in the process of economic development.
