Future industries and the development of new quality productivity: Correlation mechanism and interactive pathway

Developing new quality productivity represents a major theoretical and practical challenge facing China during the “15th Five-Year Plan” period and beyond. Due to their distinctive characteristics, future industries play a crucial role in cultivating new quality productivity. After defining the concept and features of future industries, this paper systematically elucidates the correlation mechanisms and interactive pathways between future industries and new quality productivity. The two are mutually conditional and interdependent: the new production relations and new social division of labor generated by new quality productivity provide fundamental momentum for future industries, while future industries serve as important carriers of new quality productivity. They enhance the “quality” of productivity through frontier technological breakthroughs and new factor combinations, and promote the “quantitative” expansion of productivity through nurturing new growth points and industrial spillover effects. Different levels within their system also exert differentiated impacts on new quality productivity. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that under innovation-driven development, the two form a dynamic relationship of mutual promotion and co-evolution, manifesting evolutionary pathways of “breakthrough-diffusion”, “integration-reconstruction”, and “transition-paradigm shift”, spiraling upward under the safeguards of institutional support, feedback regulation, and cyclical innovation.