The role of government support in sustainable urban development has always been a research topic of scholars, but research focusing on the relationship between government innovation support and urban green sustainable development is still relatively rare. This article uses China’s innovative city pilot policy (ICPP) to represent the innovation support provided by the government and address the interaction mechanism and the spatial spillover effect of China’s innovative city pilot policy (ICPP), green technology innovation (GTI), and green sustainable development performance (GSDP) with the support of the mediating effect model and the spatial econometric model. Based on panel data of 24 cities in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2001 to 2020, this paper establishes an evaluation index system of green sustainable development performance (GSDP), measuring with the SBM directional distance function based on the undesired output. This paper adopts the spatial difference-in-difference model (SDID) to study the impact mechanism of the ICPP on the GSDP in the Yangtze River Delta. The results show that (i) there is a positive spatial spillover effect of GSDP in the urban agglomeration of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration; (ii) ICPP has a significantly positive effect on GSDP, as verified by several robustness checks; (iii) green technology innovation plays a partial mediating effect in the relationship of the ICPP and GSDP.

China’s forest products manufacturing industry is experiencing the dual pressure of forest protection policies and wood scarcity and, therefore, it is of great significance to reveal the spatial agglomeration characteristics and evolution drivers of this industry to enhance its sustainable development. Based on the perspective of large-scale agglomeration in a continuous space, in this study, we used the spatial Gini coefficient and standard deviation ellipse method to investigate the spatial agglomeration degree and location distribution characteristics of China’s forest products manufacturing industry, and we used exploratory spatial data analysis to investigate its spatial agglomeration pattern. The results show that: (1) From 1988 to 2018, the degree of spatial agglomeration of China’s forest products manufacturing industry was relatively low, and the industry was characterized by a very pronounced imbalance in its spatial distribution. (2) The industry has a very clear core–periphery structure, the spatial distribution exhibits a “northeast-southwest” pattern, and the barycenter of the industrial distribution has tended to move south. (3) The industry mainly has a high–high and low–low spatial agglomeration pattern. The provinces with high–high agglomeration are few and concentrated in the southeast coastal area. (4) The spatial agglomeration and evolution characteristics of China’s forest products manufacturing industry may be simultaneously affected by forest protection policies, sources of raw materials, international trade and the degree of marketization. In the future, China’s forest products manufacturing industry should further increase the level of spatial agglomeration to fully realize the economies of scale.

Although there have been many studies on the factors influencing university innovation, few studies have focused on the causal relationship between government innovative support and the innovation ability of universities (IAU). To fill this research gap, based on the quasi-natural experiment perspective of the pilot policy of innovation and entrepreneurship demonstration-bases (IEDB), this study uses the difference-in-differences spatial-autocorrelation model and the mediating-effect model to study the influence mechanism of the government innovation support on IAU, based on Project 211’s panel data consisting of 104 universities and provinces and ministries in China, from 2009 to 2018. The results showed that: (1) the pilot policy of IEDB has a significantly positive effect on IAU, and its robustness is verified; (2) the university–industry cooperation (UIC) intensity has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between the pilot policy of IEDB and IAU; and (3) the pilot policy of IEDB shows a more significant positive impact on the IAU of research-oriented than on non-research-oriented universities.