How does the Development of Digital Trade Affect the Elevation of Global Value Chain Status?:Empirical Evidence from Chinese Cities
The development of digital trade has brought important opportunities and impetus to the upgrading of global value chains.This paper measures the development level of digital trade in 257 prefecture-level cities in China from 2013 to 2017,measures the position of global value chain by the export technical complexity,and studies the impact and mechanism of digital trade on the promotion of global value chain status.The results show that the development of urban digital trade significantly promotes the sta-tus of global value chain,and the threshold effect test shows that the impact presents a nonlinear feature of marginal decline.Af-ter the multi-period DID test of the cross-border e-commerce pilot policy and the Bartik instrumental variables,the research re-sults are still robust.The mechanism study shows that the development of urban digital trade can promote the status of global val-ue chain through two paths:technological innovation and cost saving;Compared with the cost saving effect,the effect of techno-logical innovation needs to be more fully played.Heterogeneity test shows that the differences of geographical location,urban ag-glomerations and city levels will affect the results of the study.For China's western regions,stable urban agglomerations and fourth-and fifth-tier cities,the development of digital trade has a significant impact on the promotion of global value chain status,indicating that the development of digital trade has an important inclusive effect.