Study on the Promotional Effect and Mechanism of New Quality Productive Forces on Green Development

The new quality productive forces have the potential to spur both the green transformation of the industrial structure and innovative advances in green technology, which will further strengthen the foundation for sustainable growth. This study analyzes panel data from 30 provinces between 2012 and 2022 to build an evaluation system for new quality productive forces and green development at the provincial level. The entropy weight TOPSIS approach is used to assign weights to each indicator. Methods including fixed effects, mediation effects, and spatial econometrics are used to examine the contribution of new quality productive forces to green development and its mediation mechanism. The study finds that: (1) New quality productive forces significantly promote green development, and the conclusion still holds after a robustness test using the instrumental variables method and excluding municipalities. (2) The new quality productive forces contribute significantly to green development by improving technology and optimizing industrial structure. (3) The new quality productive forces not only directly enhance the green development level of the region, but also positively influence the green development level of the neighboring regions through the spatial spillover effect. (4) The eastern and central regions are more affected by new productivity in terms of green development. Based on these, efforts should be made to develop new quality productive forces, increase technological research and investment, and promote the development of industrial structure to be more environmentally friendly and efficient to promote green development.