Digital content trade,characterized by its multifaceted nature encompassing culture,economy,and technology,represents a burgeoning form of international commerce.In the strategic frameworks of"cultural power"and"Internet power,"actively expanding overseas digital cultural markets and promoting high-quality digital content exports are vital pathways for China to achieve high-quality development and high-standard opening-up.Concurrently,digital content trade is a"data-intensive"trade form,involving large-scale and high-frequency cross-border data transmissions.Therefore,digital content exports are closely linked to data governance.Currently,local governments in China regulate the data in three dimensions:"governance of cross-border data flows","governance of data element transactions and circulation",and"governance of data openness and sharing".This suggests that the institutional environment for conducting digital content trade varies and evolves across regions.Thus,studying the relationship between"local data governance"and"digital content trade"can not only verify the policy effects of local data governance but also offer new perspectives for promoting the development of digital content trade.This paper focuses on local data governance,manually compiling data governance-related policy documents issued by 67 prefecture-level cities in China from 2014 to 2021,and quantifying the level of local data governance using text analysis methods.Additionally,this paper employs digital content app revenue and download volume as indicators of digital content export trade to examine the impact of local data governance initiatives on the digital content exports of local enterprises.This paper finds that the local data governance initiatives significantly promote digital content exports.Mechanism analysis reveals that the enhancement in digital content export scale through local data governance is achieved by reducing enterprises'cross-border data compliance costs and information acquisition and transmission costs,promoting enterprise innovation,and fostering the agglomeration of data-intensive industries.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of local data governance initiatives on digital content exports varies based on enterprise size,app type,app quality,category of governance initiatives,and the matching degree of data regulation integration between China and the target countries.This paper also uses the staggered-DID method,taking the delineation of"National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Zone"as a quasi-natural experiment,to enhances the causal inference and the viewpoint of this paper.The findings of this paper provide policy implications for local governments to promote the development of digital content trade and digital economy from the perspective of enhancing local data governance.Local governments should actively establish a secure and efficient mechanism for cross-border data flows,accelerate the construction of a unified,standardized,and vibrant data element market,and leverage the value-creation role of data openness and sharing.In the context of data becoming a key production factor,this paper reveals the multi-dimensional impact of local data governance on digital content trade from the perspective of local data regulation,offering novel research perspectives and empirical evidence.
local data governancedigital content exportpolicy text analysis
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
