**6. Suggested Countermeasures**

The problems existing in Shandong Province during the development of green economy are universal, and the level of green economy development tends to rise as a whole, but the coordination between subsystems is still at a low level, economic growth and excessive resource consumption and weak technological support. coexist. In order to accelerate the transformation of the green economy, active measures still need to be taken. Possible measures include:

(1) Focus on developing its own advantageous industries. A green economy requires the coordinated development of the economy, the society, energy, the environment, and science and technology. As the economy acts as material support for the development process, it should be fully attended to; therefore, choosing industrial developments that suit green economy development can assist in growing the economy and reducing the dependence on environmentally polluting resources.

(2) Improve development efficiency and reduce total energy consumption. The key to successful green economy development is to increase investment in innovation and then apply these innovations to development to improve overall efficiency. Therefore, more focus and more investment need to be put on emerging industries such as green energy and environmental protection, and priority given to the energy conservation and environmental protection project development to ensure stable green economy growth, which means that the bottleneck between economic development, energy, and the environment must be broken.

(3) Focus on the development of green markets. By continuously focusing on the development of a green market, the enthusiasm in micro-subjects can be fully mobilized; however, the sustainable development of a green market requires dedicated policy guidance and constraints at the government level to encourage the development of the green economy.

However, regardless of our positive results, there were still several limitations in this study. The regional green economy development indicator system is a multi-level, multi-directional, multi-structured system. Due to indicator data measurability, this paper only considered economic, social, environmental, and other measurable indicators, and ignored the other factors that affect sustainable development, such as institutional factors and policy factors. Therefore, further research is needed to develop a more robust regional evaluation system.

**Author Contributions:** This paper was written by M.W. in collaboration with all co-authors. Data was collected by Z.J. The first and final drafts were written by M.W. and X.Z. The results were analyzed by M.W. and X.Z. The research and key elements of the models were reviewed by Q.G. The writing work for corresponding parts and the major revisions of this paper were completed by M.W. and X.Z.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


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