Development Levels, Spatial Disparities, and Agglomeration Patterns of New Quality Productive Forces in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

The development of New Quality Productive Forces (NQPF) is an intrinsic requirement and a core lever for promoting high-quality economic growth, serving as a significant strategic support and a critical pathway for achieving Chinese-style modernization. This paper constructs a NQPF Index for cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) from two dimensions: factor structure and technological innovation, encompassing 7 primary indicators and 23 secondary indicators. The index is fitted using the Time-varying Entropy Weight TOPSIS method. Regional disparities and spatial correlations of NQPF development from 2012 to 2023 are analyzed using the Dagum Gini coefficient decomposition and Moran’s I, subsequently using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) to explore the impact of the 2022 “Eastern Data Western Computing” (EDWC) policy on the NQPF of the pilot city. The results reveal a distinct spatial hierarchy of NQPF development within the YRD, characterized by a “high-east, low-west” gradient, with moderate levels in central areas and lower performance in the peripheral northwest and southwest. While internal disparity within Zhejiang remains relatively low, significant differences persist within Anhui and Jiangsu, with the overall imbalance among YRD cities gradually intensifying, a trend primarily attributable to inter-regional disparities, most notably the pronounced gap between Shanghai and Anhui. From a spatial correlation perspective, the region demonstrates significant positive spatial autocorrelation, where the Local Moran’s I analysis pinpoints six cities near Shanghai forming a high-value cluster center, contrasting with the low-value cluster constituting the northwest part of Anhui. The synthetic results and placebo tests from the SCM indicate that the EDWC policy had no immediate significant impact on the NQPF of the pilot city Wuhu in the year of its implementation, a finding that may instead suggest a anticipatory effects of the policy dividend.