Digital Trade and Corporate Energy Consumption—Evidence from Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Area
Green development is the natural requirement for constructing a modernized economic system and a vital element of the high-quality development of digital trade.Digital trade integrates digital technology with tradi-tional trade,connects domestic and international markets,and provides strong support for promoting China's eco-nomic recovery.However,while it changes the consumption pattern,it may also alter the energy structure of enter-prises and affect the overall energy consumption.Based on the panel data of 888 listed manufacturing companies from 2011 to 2022,and with the establishment of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas(CBECCPA)as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper a-dopts a multi-period difference-in-differences(DID)method to analyze whether the digital trade promotes the syn-ergy of enterprise pollution reduction and carbon reduction growth and the coordinated development of the digital e-conomy and the green economy while bringing the dividends of economic globalization.The results show that digital trade can reduce the energy consumption of enterprises in the CBECCPA.This finding still holds after a series of robustness tests,such as employing propensity score matching(PSM)and elimi-nating the impact of contemporaneous policies.Regarding the transmission path,digital trade suppresses the energy consumption of manufacturing firms in the pilot area by accelerating digital transformation,enhancing technological innovation,and optimizing the business environment.Heterogeneity tests reveal that this inhibitory effect is more pronounced among state-owned enterprises,polluting enterprises,and those in the eastern region and non-resource cities.Further analysis indicates that digital trade has a positive impact on the synergistic development of carbon re-duction and the growth of enterprises.Therefore,it is recommended to accelerate the exploration of digital trade and expand the pilot scope,actively explore new paths for building digital trade,and construct the pilot area in a targeted manner.The possible contributions are mainly in the following aspects.First,this paper places the research perspective on digital trade and corporate energy consumption,providing new ideas for accelerating the building of a strong trading nation.Second,in terms of research content,it reveals the conduction path of digital trade on corporate en-ergy consumption from accelerating digital transformation,enhancing technological innovation and optimizing the business environment,providing a theoretical basis and experience for stimulating the environmental effect of digital trade and promoting the construction of comprehensive test area.Third,the extended analysis further proves that digital trade positively impacts the synergistic development of carbon reduction and growth of enterprises,enriching the study on the policy effect of cross-border e-commerce pilot zones and helping to release the development poten-tial of digital trade further.
green developmentdigital tradecross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areacorporate energy consumptiondigital transformationtechnological innovationbusiness environment
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
