“Made in China 2025” and entrepreneurship

Government policy is an effective strategy to encourage green innovation, but the effect of industrial policy on enterprise green innovation remains under-explored. Using China’s listed manufacturing enterprises data from 2010 to 2020, this study employs Made in China 2025 as a quasi-natural experiment as well as the DID method to explore the effect and mechanism of industrial policies on GI. The following key insights are obtained. 1) The Made in China 2025 has the potential to substantially improve the green innovation of manufacturing enterprises. This result shows that industrial policy can promote green innovation to boost the green transformation and upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry. 2) The policy effect is largely dependent on enterprise governance and regions. 3) Further mechanism considerations find that Made in China 2025 promotes green innovation through tax, environmental subsidies, and corporate social responsibility. In addition to enriching the literature on industrial policy and green innovation, this study offers valuable implications for government green governance and enterprise’s green transformation. Several suggestions for the implementation of Made in China 2025 are proposed.

The report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Party clearly pointed out that the Chinese economy has entered a new stage of high-quality development. In this new stage, improving the enterprise’s total factor productivity is undoubtedly an important foundation for boosting the real economy and achieving high-quality development. This article uses “Made in China 2025” issued in 2015 as a “quasi-natural experiment”, and uses 2011—2018 A-share manufacturing listed company data as a research sample to examine the causal relationship between industrial policy and enterprise productivity. The empirical results show that: “Made in China 2025” has effectively promoted the improvement of enterprise productivity. After effectively excluding common trends, expected effects, self-selection problems, and reverse causal problems, this conclusion is still stable; “Made in China 2025” mainly improves enterprise productivity through resource effects（tax relief, financial subsidies, credit preferences） and competition effects. The research in this paper is helpful to understand the micro-mechanism of industrial policy influencing corporate behavior, and has important implications for the government to use industrial policy to boost the real economy.

Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), an industrial policy, aims to position China among the global leading manufacturing powers. Different from other industrial policies in China, MIC 2025 is implemented by policy experimentation of pilot cities, which gives priority to the local governments. However, whether MIC 2025 pilot cities promote firm innovation is unclear in current literature. Using MIC 2025 pilot cities as a quasi-natural experiment, this study analyzes the effect and the mechanism of MIC 2025 on firm innovation. The sample consists of 4422 firm-year observations of Chinese listed manufacturing firms in 2012–2022. The result indicates that focal firm located in MIC 2025 pilot cities facilitates its innovation. Mechanism analysis show that MIC 2025 promotes firm innovation through tax incentives, public subsidies, convenient financing, academic collaboration and talent incentives. This study extends industrial policy literature with regard to how place-based policy experimentation promote the implementation of China’s industrial policies. Local governments’ participations and their interaction with the central government are vital for a successful policy experimentation.

As the fundamental physical carrier for human production and socio-economic endeavors, enhancing urban land green use efficiency (ULGUE) is crucial for realizing sustainable development. To effectively enhance urban land green use efficiency, this study systematically examines the intrinsic relationship between industrial policies and ULGUE based on panel data from 286 Chinese cities (2010–2022), employing an integrated methodology that combines the Difference-in-Differences (DID) model, Super-Efficiency Slacks-Based Measure Data Envelopment Analysis model, and ArcGIS spatial analysis techniques. The findings clearly demonstrate that the establishment of the “Made in China 2025” pilot policy significantly improves urban land green use efficiency in pilot cities, a conclusion that endures following a succession of stringent evaluations. Moreover, studying its mechanisms suggests that the pilot policy primarily enhances urban land green use efficiency by promoting industrial upgrading, accelerating technological innovation, and strengthening environmental regulations. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the policy effects are more significant in urban areas characterized by high manufacturing agglomeration, non-provincial capital/non-municipal status, high industrial intelligence levels, and less sophisticated industrial structure. This research not only provides valuable policy insights for China to enhance urban land green use efficiency and promote high-quality regional sustainable development but also offers meaningful references for global efforts toward advancing urban sustainability.

Intelligent manufacturing and digital economy are both crucial drivers of enterprise development, particularly in the context of global value chain (GVC) integration. This study aims to investigate how intelligent manufacturing influences enterprises’ positions within GVCs and explore the moderating effect of digital economy, using the ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative as a quasi-natural experiment and constructing a difference-in-differences (DID) model. Based on ecological niche theory, this study finds that intelligent manufacturing enhances GVC positioning through three primary mechanisms: capital effects, innovation effects, and signalling effects. Moreover, digital economy amplifies these effects by improving global connectivity, enabling data-driven decision-making, and facilitating seamless trade. This study provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how the integration of intelligent manufacturing and digital economy strategies can help enterprises strengthen their ecological niches, enhance their competitive advantages, and accelerate their integration into the global economy.

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.

China is rapidly becoming a major industrial competitor in high tech and growth sectors. Its economic success and related industrial policies have received a high degree of attention, especially in light of its capacity to challenge the leading position of advanced economies in several fields. China aims, through the 'Made in China 2025' strategy, to become a world leader in key industrial sectors. In these sectors, it strives to strengthen its domestic innovation capacity, to reduce its reliance on foreign technologies while moving up in global value chains. This report analyses China's approach to attain a dominant position in international markets through a combination of industrial, R&I, trade and foreign direct investment policies. It offers an assessment of China's current position compared to the EU and US innovation systems across a range of dimensions. It concludes that China has become a major industrial competitor in several rapidly expanding high tech sectors, which may well result in attaining China's goal of becoming an innovation leader in specific areas. As a response, the EU will need to boost its industrial and R&I performance and develop a trade policy that can ensure a level playing field for EU companies in China and for Chinese companies in the EU.

Since the 1990s, the emphasis on the economic significance of culture and creativity by policy makers, urban planners and researchers has contributed to the global development of (as well as debate on) the creative economy. This movement has particularly taken off in China alongside the transition from the ‘Made in China’ campaign to the ‘Created in China’ campaign. In recent years, the focus of creative industries development in China has shifted from the convergence of culture and technology, and now also includes the convergence of culture, creativity and design with related industries, covering almost all of the sectors of the national economy. Meanwhile, a movement of ‘mass entrepreneurship and innovation’ is being promoted by redefining the international maker culture. In this context, the article investigates the kinship between the maker movement and the creative economy from the perspectives of communities, spaces, activities, policies and innovation, and whether these conjure up a transition from ‘Created in China’ to ‘Intelligent Manufacturing in China’. And for the creative economy, this raises the question: is it turning to a technological future?

Manufacturing is the most important component of the real economy, and the application of modern network information technology can effectively improve the operational efficiency of manufacturing enterprises. In the context of "Made in China 2025", it is particularly important to prevent manufacturing enterprises from deviating from their main business and becoming excessively financialized. Maintaining the essential business activities of manufacturing enterprises is of great importance to China's economic development. Based on the operating data of all A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2010 to 2020 and combining the "Broadband China" demonstration city policy, this paper uses a multi-point double-differenced model to explore the relationship between network infrastructure optimization and excessive financialization of manufacturing enterprises. The research shows that: 1) Network infrastructure optimization will make manufacturing enterprises increase their financialization level, and this effect is mainly manifested through optimizing accounts receivable management. 2) From the perspective of enterprise size, compared with small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, large manufacturing enterprises are more likely to improve their financialization level through network infrastructure optimization. 3) From the perspective of the degree of diversified operations, manufacturing enterprises with high diversified operations are more likely to take advantage of network infrastructure to improve their financialization level. This study provides reference and guidance for later researchers on the impact of "new infrastructure" represented by network infrastructure construction on the business model of manufacturing enterprises.

Industrial policies are considered pivotal for fostering green innovation and elevating enterprise development. They offer vital guidance for expediting the evolution of innovation systems, enhancing enterprise green competitiveness, and catalyzing the emergence of new sources of enterprise growth. Given this, we investigate the impact of the "Made in China 2025" strategy, implemented in 2015, on enterprises' green innovation using a double-difference model to analyze this quasi-natural experiment. Our findings reveal that the "Made in China 2025" industrial policy intervention significantly enhances green innovation among enterprises. These results remain consistent across various robustness checks, including parallel trends, placebo tests, and additional robustness measures. The study uncovers that the impact of this policy varies by location, sector, and the degree of pollution among enterprises, with those in the eastern regions and those with lower pollution levels experiencing more pronounced positive effects. The results indicate that alleviating corporate financing constraints, advancing digital transformation, and improving regional marketization are core transmission channels through which the "Made in China 2025" policy influences firms' green innovation performance.

Under the global wave of intelligence, intelligent manufacturing has become a crucial means of transforming and upgrading China’s manufacturing industry. Accurate evaluation of the implementation effects of intelligent manufacturing industry policies is an urgent issue. This study uses the introduction of the “Made in China 2025” policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs the difference-in-differences method to investigate the impact of intelligent manufacturing policies on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) and its mechanisms. These results indicate that implementing intelligent manufacturing policies significantly enhances firms’ TFP. Mechanism analysis reveals that intelligent manufacturing policies can improve firms’ ESG performance by enhancing green technology innovation capabilities, increasing capital market attention, and reducing internal control costs, thereby enhancing firms’ TFP. Heterogeneity analysis finds that intelligent manufacturing policies have a more pronounced effect on promoting TFP in large-scale enterprises, labor-intensive enterprises, firms with higher technical employee levels, companies in highly competitive industries, and enterprises in regions with higher levels of digital infrastructure development and lower economic development as compared to their counterparts. This study provides evidence of how intelligent manufacturing policies drive the high-quality and sustainable development of enterprises and offers insights for future policy formulation and implementation.

产业政策对智能制造企业技术创新的影响——以《中国制造2025》为准自然实验

This study investigates the potential effects of the "Made in China 2025" plan on the unemployment rates in various pilot cities through a thorough empirical approach. To establish causal links and ensure the reliability of our results, we will utilize the Double Machine Learning model in conjunction with the Difference-in-Differences (DID) and Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) models. In addition, we apply Random Forest, Ridge Regression, and Linear Regression techniques to analyze the data and make predictions regarding the unemployment rates. The MIC 2025 program has been proven to decrease the unemployment rate significantly. This is especially supported by compelling evidence from both the DML and SDID models. The Random Forest model assigns a high value to the technological, infrastructure, and net mobility predictor variables for predicting the unemployment rate. Nevertheless, both Ridge and Linear Regression models are susceptible to anomalies and limited sample sizes. Overall, the study provided significant insight into the efficacy of the MIC 2025 plan in tackling unemployment and emphasizing the crucial significance of specific policies and investments.

중국 제조업 혁신 네트워크 구축과 사례연구 (The Establishment of a Manufacturing Innovation Network in China: Review and Case Studies)

The article analyzes the “Made in China 2025” (MIC 2025) strategy. It notes that MIC 2025 is a comprehensive development programme for 10 key sectors: new generation IT, numerical control tools and robotics, aerospace equipment, maritime engineering equipment and high-tech ships, advanced railway transportation equipment, energy saving, power equipment, agricultural machinery, new materials, etc.