Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1.  This article directly reveals in the abstract that when the degree is lower than the critical value (4.094), the positive promotion effect on corporates' total factor productivity will be stronger. Before the definition of the threshold is not stated, it is impossible for readers to understand the specific meaning of the critical value.

2. In Section 1 of this article, it is mentioned that " Intelligent manufacturing is a major channel of industrial upgrading, and the core of intelligent manufacturing is the corporate digital transformation." However, Germany has promoted "Industry 4.0" in 2013, and China started it as early as 2015 "Made in China 2025", it is suggested that the authors of this article should think that only "digital transformation" has limited effect on China's huge manufacturing industry!

3. In Section 3.3 of this article, it is explained that the digital transformation of enterprises in China has been quite popular since 2013, and the digital transformation should have a significant effects on the earlier traditional manufacturing industry. It is suggested that future research can persuade more traditional manufacturing industries to be willing embrace digital transformation.

4. Also mentioned in Section 3.3, the research samples were extracted from 2239 listed manufacturing companies, a total of 13,195, including micro-enterprises only from the Wind database. But the whole article does not specify the company size (mainly the number of employees), which is really a big shortcoming for the research results!

5.  The abbreviation of English proper nouns (such as BDA, OP, LP, MD&A, OLS, FE, GMM, CI, RR, etc.), the complete name should be written when it appears for the first time.

6.  The writing of references should follow the regulations of the journal and need to be consistent.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Well structured, and interesting study. The choice of variables is adequate for the paper, however it would be interesting to carry out the same study in other countries so it could be possible to compare.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have done a good job in their work and the article is both interesting and timely. I think there is an opportunity here through to link a bit more tyour work with what has been done in the area of analytics and how data can be used in the manufacturing sector. In this direction I would suggest you have a look at the work of Kristofferson et al., (2020) among others to develop better links with it.

 

Kristoffersen, E., Blomsma, F., Mikalef, P., & Li, J. (2020). The smart circular economy: A digital-enabled circular strategies framework for manufacturing companies. Journal of business research, 120, 241-261.

Language is fine, but just a minor spell check needed

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx