In September 2023, General Secretary Xi Jinping pioneered the concept of new quality productivity, emphasizing the need to integrate scientific and technological innovation resources, lead the development of strategic emerging industries and future industries, and accelerate the formation of new quality productivity. Concurrently, the digital economy is accelerating the deconstruction and reshaping of traditional production factors, value creation models, and industrial organization forms. Digital industrial clusters, formed through physical geographic agglomeration and digital space interconnectivity, have emerged accordingly. Among the 45 national advanced manufacturing clusters announced by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2022, 13 were digital industrial clusters. In the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)'s 2024 Global Innovation Index (GII) Report, digital industrial clusters occupied four spots in the global top ten science and technology innovation clusters. This demonstrates that innovation serves as the endogenous driving force and crucial foundation for the development of digital industrial clusters. As an emerging industrial ecosystem, can digital industrial clusters become the high-quality “soil” for cultivating new quality productivity? However, the existing studies mainly focus on the development strategies of digital industrial clusters and new quality productivity, but lacks in-depth exploration of the relationship between the two. This paper explores the mechanism and optimization pathways through which digital industrial clusters empower new quality productivity. This holds profound strategic significance for accelerating the cultivation of new quality productivity and constructing internationally competitive digital industrial clusters.

This paper treats China's digital industrial cluster pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach to empirically examine the impact of digital industrial clusters construction on new quality productivity of enterprises. This paper finds that: (1) The construction of digital industrial clusters significantly promotes new quality productivity of enterprises. From an economic perspective, compared with enterprises in non-pilot districts and counties, the new quality productivity level of enterprises in pilot districts and counties has significantly increased by 8.13% after the implementation of the policy. (2) The mechanism test indicates that there are primarily three pathways through which digital industrial clusters promote the new quality productivity of enterprises: by improving the efficiency of credit and labor allocation to optimize the factor chain, reducing customer and supplier concentration to restructure the supply chain, and fostering integrated innovation to upgrade the innovation chain; (3) The construction of digital industrial clusters has a stronger effect on promoting new quality productivity for enterprises in the eastern region, intellectual property-intensive industries, strategic emerging industries, state-owned enterprises, and smaller-scale enterprises. In addition, the digital industrial cluster pilot policy also promotes the new quality productivity of enterprises in neighboring districts and counties. Based on the above conclusions, this paper offers the following policy implications: First, further enrich and strengthen the policy content and tools for building digital industrial clusters to establish them as the core vehicle for new quality productivity. Second, focus on the heterogeneity of policy effects to enhance the precision and inclusiveness of digital industrial cluster policy. Third, strengthen spillover effects and governance mechanisms to deepen the strategic layout of digital industrial clusters.