ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Circular Economy
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsus.2025.1679298
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Pathways to Sustainability: A Focus on Emerging Technology, SDGs, and Circular EconomyView all articles
Empowering the Manufacturing Industry with Artificial Intelligence: New Quality Productivity and Sustainable Development - An Empirical Study Based on Chinese A-Share Companies
Provisionally accepted
Wenjing Cheng
Gongwen Xu*- Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, China
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Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in promoting the development of manufacturing and effectively enhancing new quality productivity. How to effectively unleash the potential of AI in boosting new quality productivity remains a subject for further research. This paper, based on the data of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2015 to 2023, uses benchmark regression, spatial Durbin, and dynamic panel models to examine the impact of AI on the new quality productivity of enterprises and its underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that AI significantly boosts the new quality productivity of manufacturing enterprises, and this conclusion holds true after a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. The mechanism analysis indicates that AI enhances the new quality productivity of manufacturing enterprises by empowering green innovation, alleviating financing constraints, and optimizing the structure of human capital. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the promoting effect of AI is particularly pronounced for enterprises in the eastern region, non-heavy polluting industries, and high-tech industries. Further spatial econometric model analysis reveals that under both 0-1 adjacency matrix and spatial geographic distance matrix, AI not only promotes the improvement of local new quality productivity but also generates positive spatial spillover effects on the development of new quality productivity in surrounding areas. The GMM model also verifies the empowering effect of AI on the new quality productivity of the manufacturing industry. The research conclusions provide theoretical support for the study of new quality productivity at the enterprise level and enrich the research on the economic consequences of AI in the micro-enterprise domain.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence1, new quality productivity2, spillover effect3, GMM mode4, sustainable development5
Received: 04 Aug 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cheng and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Gongwen Xu, xugongwen@sdjzu.edu.cn
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