It is evident that the Chinese government has highlighted the importance of green development to an unprecedented degree. The 19th Party Congress further proposed that the strictest ecological and environmental protection system should be implemented to achieve sustainable economic development. To effectively enhance China’s green development, the 18th Party Congress plan to construct an ecological civilization that also encompasses the economic, political, cultural, and societal dimensions to create a “five–in–one” strategic layout and the Party’s Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Party Central Committee put forward the new development concept of “green, innovation, coordination, openness and sharing”. Against this backdrop, transforming economic development towards a green, efficient, and clean model has become an inevitable and urgent task for China. However, this also implies that China’s traditional industrialized development model must be transformed into a new sustainable development model under limited resource and environmental constraints.

As a response to the SDGs proposed by the United Nations, China has put forward the concept of ecological civilization, which marks the implementation and innovation of global sustainable development concepts in China and also paves the way to explore sustainable development practices.

In September 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit formulated 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 sub-goals which provide the direction for global sustainable development in the next 15 years. Moreover, the Chinese government proposed a 40–45% reduction in carbon intensity by 2020 and a target for non-fossil energy to reach about 15% of primary energy consumption in the framework of the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015. Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Brazil in 1992, China has been an active participant and advocate of global environmental cooperation and compliance. However, as industrialization and urbanization continue to advance, resource consumption continues to increase and environmental pollution becomes increasingly serious, the resource and environmental constraints facing China’s sustainable development are inescapable. Over the years, the ‘GDP–only’ performance assessment system and the crude economic growth strategy have brought about rapid economic growth in China. This study provides a reference for China to further promote the construction quality of NEDP and green development. Moreover, NEDP significantly contributes to GTFP in resource-based and non-resource-based cities, while the contribution of resource-based cities is greater than that of non-resource-based cities.

(3) The heterogeneity results reveal that NEDP has a significant positive effect on GTFP in the central and western regions, while the effect was insignificant in the eastern region. (2) Mechanism analysis shows that the construction of NEDP has improved GTFP through technological innovation and industrial structure upgrading. The results show that: (1) The construction of NEDP has significantly improved the urban GTFP, and the conclusion is still valid after running the robustness test. The difference-in-difference (DID) and mediation effect model are used to test the impact and mechanism of the construction of national eco-industrial demonstration parks (NEDP) on green total factor productivity (GTFP). This study conducted quasi-natural experiments based on the panel data of 239 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2017.

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