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The transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry is supported by smart and green manufacturing, which have great potential to empower the nation's green development. This study examines the impact of the Made in China 2025 industrial policy on urban green economic growth. This study applies the super-slacks-based measure model to measure cities' green economic growth, using the double machine learning model, which overcomes the limitations of the linear setting of traditional causal inference models and maintains estimation accuracy under high-dimensional control variables, to conduct an empirical analysis based on panel data of 281 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2021. The results reveal that the Made in China 2025 strategy significantly drives urban green economic growth, and this finding holds after a series of robustness tests. A mechanism analysis indicates that the Made in China 2025 strategy promotes green economic growth through green technology progress, optimizing energy consumption structure, upgrading industrial structure, and strengthening environmental supervision. In addition, the policy has a stronger driving effect for cities with high manufacturing concentration, industrial intelligence, and digital finance development. This study provides valuable theoretical insights and policy implications for government planning to promote high-quality development through industrial policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In the current background of global economic slowdown, the traditional reliance on one regulatory instrument or the unilateral consideration of the effectiveness of one regulatory policy in policy formulation is no longer sufficient to cope with the increasingly complex contradictions between environmental protection and economic development. In the construction of a modernized environmental governance system, it has become an inevitable choice to achieve synergy between various environmental regulations. In China, the citizens' environmental supervision campaign that gradually emerged in 2006 and the local carbon trading pilots that started in 2013, as typical representatives of informal and formal environmental regulation respectively, provide vivid and realistic materials for our study. Methods: Using econometric models and microdata from listed Chinese firms from 2009 to 2020, we analyze the profound logic and internal mechanism by which this synergistic governance effect of environmental regulation affects the economic society and the development pattern of firms. Results and discussion: The study found that: (1) the synergistic effect of the carbon trading policy and citizens' environmental supervision can significantly promote the transition of enterprises to a sustainable development model, especially paying attention to the role of citizens' environmental supervision in this process. (2) The regional development level, cost transfer capability, and political connection can make the synergy of the two environmental regulations vary across firms. (3) The synergistic effect of environmental regulation promotes the behavior of enterprises in line with the requirements of sustainable development by influencing enterprises' R&D and innovation investment, resource allocation efficiency, and sustainable development awareness. (4) A favorable regional rule of law environment and moderate media attention can effectively increase the intensity of citizens' environmental supervision, and at the same time strengthen the effectiveness of synergistic governance of environmental regulation in the transformation and development of enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]