Can E-commerce Platform Construction Drive Digital-reality Integration?—Experiential Evidence from National E-commerce Demonstration Cities
The integration of the digital economy with the real economy is a process during which the digital economy sector provides data elements,digital products and digital models to promote the reconfiguration of the real economy business logic,to reform the organizational form and innovation model.It has the effect of enhancing the new kinetic energy of the real economy and upgrading international competitiveness.Thus,it is important to explore how to promote the deepening of digital integration.Taking the construction of national e-commerce demonstration cities as a quasi-natural ex-periment,the impact of the construction of e-commerce platforms on the integration of the digital economy and the real economy is empirically examined using the panel data of 283 cities from 2011 to 2021.It is found that,compared with no e-commerce platform demonstration construction cities,the es-tablishment of e-commerce platform demonstration construction cities helps to improve the level of digital-reality integration.Meanwhile,the more ad-vanced the regional logistics system is,the more prominent its digital-real integration effect is.Mechanism test confirms that the construction of e-com-merce platforms mainly promotes the deep integration of digital and real economy from the supply and the demand side.The main channels to influence the integration of digital and real economy are the wide application of digital technology on the supply side and the stimulation of market vitality on the demand side.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the digital-reality integration effect of e-commerce platform construction is more sensitive in areas with high market segmentation,non-resource cities and areas with commercial credit advantages.