Intelligent Manufacturing and New Quality Productive Forces —A Perspective Based on the Total Factor Productivity of Strategic Emerging Industries and Future Industries
Over the past four decades of reform and opening up, China’s economic development has entered the era of “innovation-driven growth” amid rising input costs and evolving social priorities. Concurrently, the external environment has undergone profound adjustments due to a “once in a century” global transformation and intensifying U.S.-China competition for technological leadership. High-quality development has become the strategic focus of the new era. In September 2023, General Secretary Xi Jinping first proposed the concept of “new quality productive forces” at a symposium on promoting the revitalization of Northeast China, and emphasized during the collective study of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in 2024: “Developing new quality productive forces is an inherent requirement and important focus for promoting high-quality development.” The Decision of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee further incorporated the cultivation of new quality productive forces as the primary task of high-quality economic development, clearly proposing to “catalyze new industries, new models, and new drivers, and develop productivity characterized by high technology, high efficiency, and high quality.” Based on this, in-depth research on how to accelerate the cultivation of new quality productive forces has important practical significance. In the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution represented by the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence, intelligent manufacturing has become the core highland of global manufacturing technological innovation. China holds a leading position in digital economy, 5G, and artificial intelligence, and has made intelligent manufacturing the main direction for building a manufacturing powerhouse. However, existing research has mostly focused on the impact of “machine replacing human” on the labor market, and there is still a lack of empirical examination of the role of intelligent manufacturing in cultivating new quality productive forces, which provides a valuable entry point for this research.
This paper selects A-share listed manufacturing companies in strategic emerging and future industries from the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets as research samples, uses micro-enterprise panel data to calculate total factor productivity (TFP) to characterize the level of new quality productive forces, and utilizes industry-level industrial robot usage data released by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) to construct enterprise-level intelligent manufacturing intensity indicators. To address endogeneity issues, this paper draws on the Bartik instrumental variable approach, multiplying different industries’ robot usage shares in the base period by industry robot increments to construct exogenous shocks, and estimates the impact of intelligent manufacturing on new quality productive forces under a two-stage least squares regression framework. Empirical results show that greater intelligent manufacturing intensity significantly enhances enterprise TFP, and the effect of cultivating new quality productive forces remains significant in various robustness tests. Mechanism tests indicate that intelligent manufacturing exerts its effects through three channels: promoting technological innovation (measured by R&D investment intensity and patent output), optimizing human capital structure (increasing proportion of technical workers), and strengthening industrial chain integration. Heterogeneity analysis finds that non-state-owned enterprises, larger enterprises, future industries, and enterprises in regions with better innovation environments benefit more. Moreover, robot applications also significantly improve enterprise market valuation and social contribution capabilities.
This study makes three key contributions. First, it measures the level of new quality productive forces from a micro perspective based on TFP for the first time. Second, it empirically reveals the causal relationship between intelligent manufacturing and the promotion of new quality productive forces and clarifies its working mechanism. Third, it employs the Bartik IV design to overcome reverse causality and omitted variable bias, ensuring the reliability of estimation results. The research conclusions provide important references for policy-making, suggesting the promotion of intelligent manufacturing through precise infrastructure investment, R&D incentives, and talent cultivation, tailored to local conditions, thereby accelerating the cultivation of new quality productive forces and achieving high-quality economic development.
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