The Impact of New Quality Productive Forces on Common Prosperity: Evidence from Chinese Cities

As a pivotal engine driving China’s economic development, new quality productive forces are profoundly shaping the pathways for realizing common prosperity and Chinese modernization. The study constructs multidimensional evaluation frameworks for new quality productive forces and common prosperity, respectively, measures the development levels of new quality productive forces and common prosperity across 277 prefectural-level and above cities in China from 2013 to 2022, and analyzes the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of China’s new quality productive forces over the past decade using ArcGIS 10.8.1. Meanwhile, the two-way fixed model and the spatial Durbin model are used to analyze the impact of new quality productive forces on common prosperity and its spatial spillover effect. The study finds the following: (1) China’s new quality productive forces development levels generally show a spatial pattern of “high in the east and low in the west”, in which cities located in the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the eastern coastal strip have a higher level of new quality productive forces than other cities, with significant inter-regional differences. (2) New quality productive forces exhibit a robust and significant promoting effect on common prosperity. Mechanism analysis reveals that this effect operates through three channels: enhancing economic agglomeration, advancing industrial structure upgrading, and improving labor misallocation. (3) Regional heterogeneity shows that the promotion effect of new quality productive forces on common prosperity is particularly prominent in Northeast China and Eastern China. Structural heterogeneity reveals that labor materials and objects of labor exhibit more pronounced effects in enhancing common prosperity compared with laborers. (4) Spatial econometric analysis confirms that the new quality productive forces have a significant spatial spillover effect on common prosperity. The findings provide theoretical support for advancing common prosperity while contributing to China’s approach to addressing developmental imbalances among developing countries within the global community with a shared future.