Abstract: Digital transformation serves as a crucial initiative to promote the development of new quality productive forces among enterprises in supply chains. How enterprise digital transformation can empower new quality productive forces constitutes one of the key issues affecting China’s economy in achieving high-quality, high-efficiency, and sustainable development. This paper proposes the concept of new quality productive forces and constructs a corresponding indicator system, enriching the theoretical connotation of new quality productive forces in current research. It supplements the influencing factors and realization mechanisms of new quality productive forces among supply chain enterprises. From the perspective of supply chain spillover effects, using matched data between client and supplier firms listed on China’s A-share market from 2011 to 2022, this study investigates the heterogeneous mechanisms of how client firms’ digital transformation influences supplier firms’ new quality productive forces. The findings reveal that client firms’ digital transformation significantly enhances supplier firms’ new quality productive forces, indicating a backward spillover effect of digital transformation on the development of new quality productive forces in supply chains. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that client firms’ digital transformation primarily promotes supplier firms’ new quality productive forces by improving supply chain stability and transparency. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the promoting effect of client firms’ digital transformation is more pronounced when supplier firms are state-owned enterprises, located in eastern regions with stronger economic foundations, and belonging to high-tech industries. The research outcomes suggest that leveraging the spillover advantages of enterprise digital transformation holds significant theoretical and practical implications for fostering new quality productive forces in supply chains, enhancing supply chain stability and transparency, and revitalizing production factors along supply chains.

Key words: digital transformation, new quality productive forces, spillover effects, supply chain