Synergizing Green Digital Ecosystems and Financial-Intellectual Capabilities: A Systematic Literature Review
Abstract
This study systematically reviews and synthesizes the scholarly literature on how the convergence of green digital ecosystems, intellectual capital, and internal financial structure shapes resilience and sustainable growth trajectories in the global manufacturing industry. Following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, this review identifies, screens, and synthesizes peer-reviewed studies indexed in Scopus published between 1966 and 2025. A structured search strategy, explicit inclusion/exclusion criteria, and a four-phase PRISMA flow (identification, screening, eligibility, inclusion) were applied to ensure methodological transparency and replicability. Thematic synthesis was used to map the literature into four analytical clusters: digital transformation (Industry 4.0), green industrial policy, intellectual capital and human capital, and financial structure/resilience. The synthesis indicates that Industry 4.0 technologies and green industrial policy function as complementary rather than competing pillars of sustainable manufacturing output. Resilience is strongly conditioned by a non-linear, inverted-U relationship between financial leverage and firm-level performance, moderated by the quality of intellectual capital. Digital technology adoption and foreign direct investment (FDI) are consistently associated with higher GDP and regional economic growth in emerging-market contexts, while financial-technology diffusion and fiscal-resilience mechanisms strengthen absorptive capacity for knowledge spillovers from international trade and investment. This review contributes an integrative conceptual framework linking macro-level digital and environmental policy with firm-level financial and human-capital determinants of manufacturing resilience, a linkage rarely modeled jointly in prior SLRs. It offers theoretical contributions to endogenous growth and resource-based frameworks, alongside practical implications for policymakers and industrial managers navigating the twin green–digital transition.