Government Digital Procurement and Enterprise Digital Transformation
Digital technology,with big data and artificial intelligence at its core,is transforming and reshaping the organizational management and operational modes of enterprises,which has gradually become the key force in promoting high-quality economic development.The report of the 20th Party Congress emphasized the necessity to accelerate the development of the digital economy and promote the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy.However,many enterprises are faced with obstacles such as insufficient digital transformation capabilities,high transformation costs,and long transition periods.Coupled with the positive externality characteristics of digital transformation,the private benefits generated by the transformation are usually smaller than the social benefits.Thus,relying only on the self-regulation function of the market may be insufficient incentives for corporate digital transformation,indicating that the government must participate in the market regulation.After combing the literature,this study finds that most of the existing research focuses on the perspectives of the supply of digital technology or internal corporate management when examining the influencing factors of digital transformation;thus,there is a need for more empirical evidence from the perspective of external demand-side incentives.As an essential policy tool for demand-side incentives,government digital procurement can influence enterprise digital transformation through financial support and improved market expectations.On the one hand,it can alleviate the financing constraints of enterprises through direct financial support and indirect guarantee functions,and it can solve the problem of capital shortage in the process of enterprise digital transformation.On the other hand,government digital procurement will directly stimulate the demand for digital products and services of enterprises and activate the demand of a wide range of markets,which can help to improve the market expectations of enterprises,thereby improving digital transformation.Based on the above theoretical inference,this study uses a text mining function through Python to merge government procurement contract data with the number of Chinese listed companies by identifying digital products and services procurement items in government procurement based on related word frequencies of digital transformation.Using this method,this study tests the impact of government digital procurement on enterprises'digital transformation.The findings reveal that expanding the scale of government digital procurement helps promote firms'digital transformation,and the conclusions remain robust after endogeneity tests of Bartik instrumental variable regression.Regarding the potential mechanism,we found that government digital procurement promotes enterprise digital transformation by alleviating enterprises'financing constraints and improving their market expectations.Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive effect of government digital procurement on firms'digital transformation is more pronounced among non-state-owned firms,small-scale firms,firms with lower market positions,and regions with better digital infrastructure.Further analysis on maximizing the fiscal incentive effect of government procurement reveals that tax incentives and government digital subsidies can synergize different policy instruments to drive digital transformation and that venture capital from social capital can strengthen the positive effect of government procurement.In addition,the positive impact of government digital procurement on the digital transformation of enterprises plays a supply chain diffusion effect,which is reflected in the fact that an increase in government digital procurement for supplier enterprises can stimulate the digital transformation of downstream customer enterprises,while the opposite effect is not apparent.Based on the above conclusions,this study proposes policy recommendations from three aspects.First,government departments should accelerate digital technology innovation to expand the scale of government digital procurement and give full play to the pulling effect of demand-side leadership on enterprise digital transformation.Second,the directionality of government digital procurement should be refined,and the scale of government digital procurement should be enhanced for private and small-scale enterprises.Moreover,a single large-amount contract can be split into multiple sub-contracts to help more subjects enjoy the dividends of government digital procurement.Third,a diversified incentive mechanism for policy tools should be developed to give full play to the coordinating functions of different policy tools and take multiple measures to jointly promote the digital transformation of enterprises.
Government Digital ProcurementDigital TransformationFinancing ConstraintsMarket Expectations
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
