New Quality Productive Forces, Innovation and Total Factor Productivity: A Path to High-Quality Development Based on the Sustainability Framework

China’s transition from rapid growth to high-quality development requires pharmaceutical manufacturing to pursue productivity gains that are both innovation-driven and sustainable. New quality productive forces (NQPF)—characterized by technological innovation, optimized factor allocation, and industrial upgrading—offer a pathway toward this goal by linking efficiency improvement with resource efficiency and cleaner production. Using panel data from A-share-listed pharmaceutical manufacturing firms during 2017–2024, this study constructs a multidimensional firm-level NQPF index and employs a two-way fixed-effects model to examine its impact on total factor productivity (TFP), together with the mediating role of innovation quality and the moderating effect of R&D intensity. The results show that NQPF significantly improves enterprise TFP, with stronger effects among large-scale firms and those in eastern and western China. Innovation quality serves as an important transmission mechanism, while R&D intensity positively moderates the NQPF–TFP relationship; these findings are confirmed by a series of robustness checks. The study contributes to the literature by identifying firm-level transmission mechanisms and boundary conditions in the pharmaceutical industry, rather than treating NQPF as a macro-level concept or a direct productivity driver. From a sustainable-development perspective, these findings suggest that NQPF-driven productivity gains are consistent with, and may lay the foundation for, the sustainable transformation of pharmaceutical firms: higher TFP implies more efficient use of knowledge and material resources, and the innovation-quality mechanism indicates that NQPF encourage firms to move toward original and technologically advanced innovation—an essential condition for cleaner production and green technological upgrading. In this sense, high-quality innovation and R&D investment are not merely efficiency-enhancing factors but also potential enablers of sustainable industrial development. Because TFP is used as the outcome variable, however, the environmental and social dimensions of sustainable development are not directly estimated and remain an avenue for future research. The findings offer differentiated policy implications for pharmaceutical firms of different sizes and regions, emphasizing that strengthening NQPF and promoting high-quality innovation are critical for balancing efficiency gains with long-term sustainability in the pharmaceutical sector.