  We consider QCD radiative corrections to the production of colourless
high-mass systems in hadron collisions. The logarithmically-enhanced
contributions at small transverse momentum are treated to all perturbative
orders by a universal resummation formula that depends on a single
process-dependent hard factor. We show that the hard factor is directly related
to the all-order virtual amplitude of the corresponding partonic process. The
direct relation is universal (process independent), and it is expressed by an
all-order factorization formula that we explicitly evaluate up to the
next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. Once the NNLO
scattering amplitude is available, the corresponding hard factor is directly
determined: it controls NNLO contributions in resummed calculations at full
next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, and it can be used in
applications of the q_T subtraction formalism to perform fully-exclusive
perturbative calculations up to NNLO. The universality structure of the hard
factor and its explicit NNLO form are also extended to the related formalism of
threshold resummation.
