Digital Government Empowering Trade:Digital Government Construction and Quality Upgrading of Chinese Exports
Currently,despite the rapid growth of China's export trade,there is still a gap between the quality of China's export products and those of developed countries.To build a"Chinese path to modernization",efforts must be intensified to solve the problem that China's export trade is large in scale but not good in quality.In the era of the"digital revolution",digital transformation has become the core driving force of high-quality development in China's economy and society.In China,governments at all levels are actively embracing the wave of digital transformation by strengthening the construction of digital government.With the third wave of globalization,digital technology has become a key force in reshaping the international trade pattern.Moreover,as an important feature of the wide application of digital technology in government departments,the positive role of digital government in spurring the vitality of market entities,strengthening data governance,and supporting institutional innovation is further advanced.This raises the following question:from the perspective of China's trade development,can the construction of digital government be used as a new engine to promote high-quality export development?Relevant literature has focused on the impact of digital technology empowerment in the production and trading sectors on the quality of export products,but research on the high-quality development of export trade from the perspective of the digital transformation of government departments is still scarce.Additionally,due to limited data availability,existing literature on the economic effects of digital government only focuses on the national level and fails to effectively measure the construction of digital governments.Based on text big data from the"Government Work Report"of various Chinese cities,this study uses machine learning methods to measure the digital government construction index and then matches them with the China Customs Database and China City Statistical Yearbook.It empirically investigates the influence of digital government construction on export product quality upgrading and the underlying mechanism.The conclusions of this study are as follows:First,digital government construction can significantly improve the quality of China's urban export products.The robustness of this conclusion is validated through causal inference such as instrumental variable(Ⅳ)and staggered difference-in-differences(DID).Second,digital government construction can improve the upgrading of export product quality through three channels:reducing information costs,stimulating urban innovation,and optimizing resource allocation.Third,the construction of digital government has a heterogeneous impact on export product quality,influenced by variations in urban administrative levels,governmental efficiency,product time sensitivity,and export trade categories.This study contributes to the existing literature in four main ways.First,this is the first study to examine the effects of China's digital government construction and the upgrading of urban export products.Second,utilizing data from the"Government Work Report"of Chinese cities,this study uses machine learning methods to accurately measure the digital government construction index of Chinese cities.It fills in the research gap of the digital government index at the city level.Third,to identify the causal effect,it constructs Ⅳ using two strategies:exogenous shock and shift-share analyses.Moreover,we design a staggered DID model by taking advantage of the characteristics that Chinese cities promote the construction of digital government in batches.Fourth,in terms of mechanism,this study explores how the information cost reduction effect,urban innovation driving effect,and resource optimization effect of digital government construction promote the upgrading of urban export product quality.This study can effectively explain the driving effect of government digital transformations on high-quality export development in China and provide a reliable policy reference for using digital government construction to support the"digital intensive trade"initiative.
Digital GovernmentQuality of Export ProductsGovernment Work ReportMachine Learning
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
