China is currently facing the arduous tasks of energy conservation, emission reduction and structural transformation, making it of great significance to study the digital transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. As an important informal regulatory system, public environmental concerns affect corporate environmental behavior by increasing external environmental pressure. This study uses the data of listed companies in China’s heavily polluting industries from 2012 to 2020 and Baidu Index data to analyze how public environmental concerns affect the digital transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. This study finds that public environmental concerns can significantly promote the digital transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. For non-state-owned, green image and high-tech enterprises, the impact is even more obvious. Furthermore, based on the structural and hierarchical perspective of enterprise digital transformation, we find that public environmental concerns significantly promote digital technology application. This study puts forward some suggestions for government departments to formulate environmental protection regulations, enterprises to fulfill their green responsibilities and the public to participate in environmental governance.

As political boundaries, countries and cities as administrative boundaries may restrict the flow of goods and factors. Economic openness is to weaken the economic boundaries of countries and cities and promote the flow of goods and factors. As a super-large economy, China has actively promoted both opening-up to the outside world and domestic opening-up, integrating into the international economic circulation system and building a unified domestic market, creating a high-quality business environment for enterprises. The improvement of the environment has enhanced entrepreneurial performance and promoted technological innovation of small enterprises and urban economic prosperity. The research shows that there is an inherent and necessary connection between the degree of openness, business environment, and entrepreneurial performance. Economic openness and business environment promote the formation of a high-quality entrepreneurial environment, which in turn affects entrepreneurial performance and economic development performance. Namely, various changes in the business environment have greatly affected the "business dynamism".