Developing new quality productive forces according to local conditions is a profound understanding of China’s national conditions and represents a new requirement for implementing the concept of coordinated development based on an emphasis on innovation. However, there is still a lack of understanding on the coordinated development issues during the formation and development of new quality productive forces, which is specifically manifested in the vagueness of its growth patterns, regional disparity, and coordinated development.

This paper defines new quality productive forces from the perspective of the technological-economic paradigm. On the basis of accounting for the added value of the “three new” economies, it constructs an efficiency measurement framework to measure the new quality productive forces of China’s 30 provinces from 2016 to 2022, and further reveals their growth patterns, regional disparity, and coordinated development. The study finds that the development trend of China’s new quality productive forces continues to be positive. From the dimensions of technological progress and technical efficiency, six types of growth patterns of new quality productive forces are identified: “synchronous growth” type represented by Guangdong, “incubation and hatching” type represented by Hainan, “technology-driven” type represented by Shanghai, “introduction and absorption” type represented by Fujian, “potential breakthrough” type represented by Guangxi, and “imitation and catching up” type represented by Henan. After the outbreak of Sino-American trade frictions, regional disparity in China’s new quality productive forces has continued to expand, with the combined effect of intra-regional and inter-regional disparity being the main source. Reasonably controlling and moderately releasing the polarization, echo, and diffusion effects of regional new quality productive forces, ensuring the leap of new quality productive forces in medium- and low-level areas, preventing the development traps of medium- and high-level areas, and maintaining the leading advantages of high-level areas will be key to the comprehensive and coordinated development of China’s new quality productive forces.

The contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it proposes a measurement framework for new quality productive forces from the perspective of production efficiency, and identifies the growth patterns of new quality productive forces in each province based on the accurate measurement of new quality productive forces. Second, it accounts for the added value of the “three new” economies and incorporates it into the measurement framework of new quality productive forces to provide data support for accurately measuring new quality productive forces. Third, it reveals the regional disparity of new quality productive forces, as well as the impact of polarization, echo, and diffusion effects on coordinated development from a spatiotemporal dimension.