Under the concept of green development, enterprises will face more environmental constraints. Whether government environmental regulation (ER) can effectively promote corporate environmental performance (CEP) has not yet been unified among scholars, and few studies have conducted bibliometric analysis on ER and CEP. Based on the above, this study has three purposes: first, to fill the research gap by analyzing and visualizing 72 articles on ER and CEP through Biblioshiny and VOSviewer; second, to help scholars easily understand the research development and quickly find promising research directions; and lastly, to enable the government and corporate managers gain a more comprehensive view of ER’s impacts on CEP, which can assist in policy making and business management. The research found that: (a) the number of articles and citations in the field is on the rise. China is the most academically influential country in terms of publications, citations, and collaborations. Journal of Cleaner Production is the top-ranked journal. Ramanathan R, Testa F, and Zhang Y are the top three authors. Environmental management, sustainability, and China are the most popular keywords. Collaboration between authors, institutions, and countries is relatively weak and isolated. (b) ER and CEP have three emerging clusters: Climate Change, FDI, as well as Environmental Awareness, and three core clusters: Environmental Management, Data Envelopment Analysis, and Economic Analysis. The evolution of themes shows a trend from decentralized to centralized and then back to decentralized. (c) Future research can take the Regulatory Framework, Green Technological Innovation, and Environmental Management System as breaking points.

As urbanisation increases, questions arise about the desirability of further urban growth, as it was not accompanied by corresponding economic growth, and social and environmental problems began to grow in the largest cities in the world. The objective of the article is to substantiate the limits of urbanization growth in Kazakhstan based on the study of theoretical views on this process, analysis of the dependence of social and economic parameters of 134 countries on the urbanisation level and calculation of the urbanisation level that contributes most to economic growth and social well-being. To achieve the goal, the following tasks have been set and solved: theoretical views on the process of urbanization have been generalized; a hypothesis has been put forward about the emergence of an “urbanization trap” in which the growth of large cities is not accompanied by economic growth and improvement of social well-being; an analysis of the dependence of socio-economic indicators on the level of urbanization has been carried out on the example of 134 countries of the world; the level of urbanization that maximizes economic growth and social well-being is calculated; the necessity of the development of small towns in Kazakhstan is substantiated. To solve the problems, the methods of logical analysis, analogies and generalizations, economic statistics, index, graphical, Pearson correlation analysis, Spearman and Kendall rank regression based on models in SPSS were used. As a result, the following conclusions are made: the hypothesis of a possible deterioration of socio-economic indicators in large cities is confirmed; the best positive result is demonstrated by the level of urbanization of 50%–59%. The recommendations are justified: in Kazakhstan, it is necessary to adhere to the level of urbanization no higher than 59%; the growth of urbanization should be ensured through the development of small towns; it is necessary to improve the methods of managing the process of urbanization and develop individual city plans.