Digital-Substantive Integration and Optimization of Export Product Strategies for Firms:Based on the Perspective of Flexible Production
This paper constructs a model of multi-product heterogeneous firms that includes digital firms and investigates the theoretical mechanism of digital firms that empowers multi-product firms to optimise their export product strategies from a flexible production perspective.Using Chinese firm-level data from between 2000 and 2016,it develops an econometric model to examine the effect and mechanism of digital proximity on the export product scope and skewness of Chinese manufacturing firms.The results of the study indicate that increasing digital proximity not only helps to expand the export product scope,but also significantly improves their export skewness,which enhances intra-firm resource allocation and enriches their export product scope,thus achieving the joint improvement of Chinese firms'export product strategies in terms of efficiency and diversity.The analysis of the mechanism also reveals that digital proximity not only directly improves the flexible production capacity of manufacturing firms through the flexible production effect,but also indirectly increases the degree of market competition,ultimately driving the optimisation of export product strategies for manufacturing firms.