As one of the world’s largest economies and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, China plays a critical role in global environmental management. As China emphasizes new quality productive forces, understanding how green finance can enable green innovation quality (GIQ) is essential for projecting China’s influence in the sustainable development of the global ecological environment. This paper sets up a quasi-natural experiment using the Green Credit Policy (GCP) to examine the impact of green financial credit allocation on the enterprises’ GIQ. The findings demonstrate that the GCP has the potential to improve the GIQ of the green credit-restricted industries, compared to non-green credit-restricted ones. It is worth noting that as China speeds up its industrial digital transformation and productivity improvement, green financial credit allocation can elevate the digitization level and total factor productivity of green credit-restricted industries, leading to a higher GIQ by curbing corporate shadow banking. Further research shows that fintech and financial regulation can strengthen the positive influence of the GCP on GIQ. Moreover, regional intellectual property protection has a beneficial synergistic effect in combination with the policy.

The construction of smart cities has promoted the process of urbanization and sustainable urban sprawl, which may accelerate regional coordination by enhancing the spatial correlation among the cities. Firstly, this paper built the mechanism for the impact of urban sprawl and smart city construction on regional coordination and adopted the corrected night light data as the index of economic measurement, using the dynamic fixed effect spatial Dubin model to test theoretical mechanism. It is found that urban sprawl has strongly promoted the regional coordination, which is especially obvious among the neighboring cities. However, the construction of smart cities is not conducive to regional coordination, only when interacting with urban sprawl. The results of robustness check and endogenous treatment are consistent with the baseline regression. Further research shows that urban sprawl restricts the positive effect of industrial agglomeration but could promote economic growth and regional coordination through smart city construction. The policy enlightenment lies in that smart city construction should be promoted, so as to improve economic growth, and smart city network and urban sprawl should be synchronously promoted to accelerate regional coordination.

Artificial intelligence technology plays an important role in driving the coordinated development of intelligentization and greenization in China’s manufacturing industry. However, there may be differences in enterprises’ capabilities to advance this coordinated development, and it remains unclear whether promoting such dual transformation is an individual behavior or a collective phenomenon. This paper employs the entropy weight method and the coupling coordination degree model to measure the level of coordinated development between enterprise intelligentization and greenization, and examines the peer effects of dual transformation among enterprises. The findings show that enterprise intelligentization lags behind greenization, with the two aspects being in a state of low-level coupling but steadily improving. Additionally, there are significant peer effects in the coordinated development of enterprise intelligentization and greenization, with their formation mechanisms primarily reflected in intelligentization enabling greenization, intra-industry competition, and the learning effect of followers from leaders. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the peer effects in the coordinated development of intelligentization and greenization are more pronounced among state-owned enterprises and technology-intensive firms. Moreover, enterprises located in the same province, within the same large-scale city, or within the same interlocking directorate network are more likely to exhibit peer effects in dual transformation.