New Quality Productive Forces and Common Prosperity: The Mediating Role of Multidimensional Urbanization

Abstract

This study examines how new quality productive forces (NQPF) affect common prosperity through multidimensional pathways of new-type urbanization. Using a balanced panel of 30 Chinese provinces from 2012 to 2024 (390 observations), the analysis employs two-way fixed effects and a parallel multiple-mediation model, with indirect effects assessed through 5,000 Bootstrap resamples. The results indicate that NQPF are positively associated with common prosperity in the baseline model. Among the four urbanization dimensions, economic urbanization is the only robust positive mediating pathway, with an indirect effect of 0.061 and a 95% Bootstrap confidence interval of [0.042, 0.086], accounting for approximately 95% of the total indirect effect. Population, social, and ecological urbanization do not show significant mediation in the baseline decomposition. When the four dimensions are combined into an overall urbanization index, the equal-weight specification produces a negative indirect effect of -0.015, whereas the entropy-weight specification yields a non-significant indirect effect, indicating sensitivity to aggregation and weighting. Robustness checks using alternative weighting, additional controls, a substituted dependent variable, and the exclusion of centrally administered municipalities generally support the central role of economic urbanization. These findings suggest that aggregate urbanization measures may obscure heterogeneous transmission mechanisms and that dimension-specific analysis provides a more informative assessment of how NQPF relate to common prosperity.