As China’s economy enters a new stage of high-quality development, achieving a qualitative leap from factor-driven growth to innovation-driven growth has become a central issue. New Quality Productive Forces (NQPF), as the intrinsic requirement for driving this leap, involve frontier technologies with high risks and long development cycles, as well as significant externalities associated with green transformation. These features pose fundamental challenges to the traditional financial system, which often suffers from structural contradictions such as maturity mismatches and resource misallocation. Against this background, this study aims to construct an analytical framework based on Marxist financial theory to systematically elucidate the internal mechanisms through which financial development promotes the formation of New Quality Productive Forces, and to empirically examine the corresponding transmission pathways.
At the theoretical level, this study builds upon Marx’s theories of interest-bearing capital and capital circulation, while critically incorporating functional perspectives from Western financial development theory. On this basis, it proposes an integrated analytical framework of “capital contradictions-financial innovation-New Quality Productive Forces.” This framework reveals the mechanism through which finance resolves the intrinsic contradictions of the profit-seeking logic of capital and promotes the qualitative upgrading of productive forces via institutionalized innovation. At the empirical level, drawing on the connotation of New Quality Productive Forces—encompassing new laborers, new means of labor, new objects of labor, new forms of production organization, and new technologies—this study constructs a comprehensive provincial-level index of NQPF using the entropy weighting method. Using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces over the period 2008—2022, the study employs a two-way fixed effects model to examine the impact of financial development on NQPF. Furthermore, mediation effect models and dimension-specific regression analyses are applied to identify the underlying transmission mechanisms and to assess the roles of different forms of financial innovation.
The empirical results yield three main findings. First, financial development has a statistically significant and robust positive effect on New Quality Productive Forces. This result remains stable after various robustness tests. Second, mechanism tests reveal that financial development does not operate solely through capital accumulation. Instead, it enhances New Quality Productive Forces through multiple channels, including the promotion of technological innovation, the advancement of green development, and the improvement of distributional fairness. These results suggest that NQPF are not generated by isolated technological progress alone, but by coordinated improvements in innovation quality, environmental sustainability, and inclusive development. Third, further analysis shows that green finance, digital inclusive finance, and sci-tech finance—representing key forms of contemporary financial innovation—each exert significant positive effects on New Quality Productive Forces. Green finance facilitates the internalization of environmental costs and directs capital toward low-carbon and sustainable activities; digital inclusive finance reduces transaction thresholds by leveraging data and digital technologies; and sci-tech finance improves the matching of sci-tech innovation risks.
This study makes several main contributions. First, it introduces financial development into the analytical framework for the formation mechanism of New Quality Productive Forces, emphasizing its key institutional role in optimizing resource allocation, supporting green transformation, and driving innovation, thereby complementing existing studies that predominantly focus on technological or industrial perspectives while neglecting financial institutions. Second, by proposing and empirically validating the systematic causal chain of “capital contradictions-financial innovation-New Quality Productive Forces,” this study incorporates green finance and other financial innovations into a unified political economy framework, and constructs a composite index of financial development based on provincial panel data. In doing so, it reveals the institutional foundations through which finance promotes the leap of productive forces from quantitative expansion to qualitative upgrading. Third, building on Marx’s theories of interest-bearing capital and capital circulation, and in conjunction with the financial practices of socialism with Chinese characteristics, this study advances the novel proposition of “finance as a catalyst for qualitative transformation.” It argues that, under the socialist market economy, finance can transform the internal contradictions of capital logic into institutionalized and governable rules through financial innovation, thereby expanding the explanatory scope of Marxist financial theory in the contemporary Chinese context.
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