Digital Economy Integration Driving New Quality Productivity: Factor Mobility and Institutional Coordination

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the Yangtze River Delta integration being elevated to a national strategy, the integration of the digital economy has become a key pathway for the region to foster new-quality productive forces. This paper constructs a dual-drive theoretical framework for how the integration of the digital economy drives new-quality productive forces, based on the two dimensions of factor mobility and institutional synergy. The study proposes that the integration of the digital economy directly empowers new-quality productive forces through three pathways—technological breakthroughs, factor allocation and industrial transformation—whilst generating indirect transmission effects by facilitating the cross-regional flow of three types of factors: data, technology and talent. At the same time, institutional synergy plays a positive moderating role in the transformation from macro-level integration to micro-level productive forces. More importantly, factor mobility and institutional synergy are not independent, parallel mechanisms, but rather constitute a spiralling, synergistic system in which ‘mobility drives institutional innovation, and institutions ensure the unimpeded flow of factors’. On this basis, this paper distils four core theoretical propositions and offers policy implications in light of the latest collaborative legislative practices in the Yangtze River Delta. This paper provides an integrated theoretical analytical framework for understanding the pathways to fostering new-quality productive forces within the process of regional integration.