The impact of Chinese government’s attention on inclusive green development: evidence from 253 cities in China

China, as the largest developing country, is facing a severe challenge in achieving inclusive and green transformation. However, current studies fail to explain the reasons and necessity of incorporating “inclusiveness” into green development reasonably, and the perspective of research on inclusive green development of cities is relatively simplistic. Therefore, we explain the meaning of “inclusiveness” from a theoretical perspective based on the generalized Bonferroni curve and proposed a novel approach to measure inclusive green development in Chinese cities by combining the SBM-GML model and the resource and environment Gini coefficient. Then, we measure the government’s attention by extracting relevant word frequency from government reports and expand the research perspective to explore the impact of government’s attention on inclusive green development, as well as the mediating mechanisms therein. The study finds that the government’s attention can significantly boost inclusive green development, with eco-environment attention, urban governance attention, and green development attention promoting inclusive green development by 1.01, 0.57, and 0.19%, respectively. It also has heterogeneous effects on regions, economic scales, and city types. These results have passed the robustness and endogeneity tests. Finally, industrial structure upgrading and green technology innovation play a significant mediating role in the impact of the government’s attention on promoting inclusive green development. These conclusions provide empirical evidence for the government to formulate work plans in future.