A Research On The Effect Of Electronic Commerce On Global Value Chain Embeddedness

Since 21^st Century,the division of global production has been continuously extended.All countries in the world have been involved in different links of product production.The production chain worldwide has been greatly extended,and intermediate goods trade has become the main form of current trade.Along with the movement of intermediate goods in the production chain,the product value changes in different countries.Whether it is in China which plays the"world factory"role,or in the western developed countries who dominate design,research and development,each intermediate good is accompanied by the generation of value added products.The mode of"gathering the power of all the countries"to complete the whole production process makes the traditional method of measuring the trade volume seem inopportune.Although China is a big trading country in the world,the added value of its participation in the global production division is not as large as it is imagined.Therefore,in the trade analysis,the WWZ method is used to decompose the added value of trade to make it closer to the"truth of trade".In recent years,with the development of Internet technology,Internet has been widely used in various fields in the society.Thus the business model of electronic commerce came into being.In recent years,e-commerce has developed rapidly,and China has become a global electronic commerce country.At the same time,the development of e-commerce has changed the traditional international trade mode,making information flow more timely and efficient,weakening the information,management and coordination costs of traditional trade.Both buyer and seller can achieve direct transaction,which cuts out middlemen in international trade and greatly reduces the traditional international trade cost.As a new trade pattern“Internet+international trade”,e-commerce has important theoretical and practical significance in promoting the continued growth of China’s foreign trade business and Chinese enterprises to embed in global value chain and realize the transformation and upgrading.On the basis of previous research,this paper will analyze the impact of e-commerce on global embedding value chain from two aspects of theoretical and empirical study to provide the reference on the national level,industry level and enterprise level.The main contents of the paper includes literature review,the analysis of the current situation of e-commerce and its influence on the global embed value chain,model building and empirical test of the influence of e-commerce on the global value chain.The thesis is divided into seven parts,and the general contents and conclusions of each part are as follows:The first part is the introduction.It mainly introduces the background,significance,content,ideas,methods,and points of innovation.The second part is the literature review and he mechanism analysis.It is also divided into two main parts,namely e-commerce and embedded value chain.On the basis of this classification,research methods are summarized and compared from different perspectives,summarizing the past research ideas and content,laying the foundation for further research.on the basis of the previous scholars’research literature,this paper analyzes the channel that e-commerce affects the embedding of global value chain.There are three main aspects.“Cost reduction effect”reducing the threshold of global value chain embedding by reducing information and other costs to promote global value chain embeddedness.“Reverse technology spillovers effects”transmits technology to"recipient countries"through the internet promoting the country’s technological upgrading and promotes global value chain embeddedness.Finally,the"service tradeable effect",namely the rise of e-commerce,expands the boundary of service trade,making service outsourcing a normal form,and promotes the service industry embedded among different economies into the global value chain.The third part is the analysis of the current situation of e-commerce development and value chain embeddedness.First of all,we analyze the current situation of e-commerce in China,and compare the development status of e-commerce with developed countries of OECD.Then we analyze the degree of Chinese current global value chain embeddedness ness and the comparison with OECD countries.At last we make the statistical description of the correlation between e-commerce and global value chain embeddedness intuitively.The fourth part is the measurement model,the index selection and the data processing.In this chapter we describe the econometric model of value chain embedded in the e-commerce,the value chain embedded industry level index,the embedded enterprise level index and e-commerce index in detail.The construction of the relevant indicators on the national level,industry level and enterprise level control variables will also be described in detail.In addition,the source of all variable data is enumerated.The fifth part is the empirical analysis of the value chain embeddedness in the industry level.By referring to Wang Zhi（2015）,measure the value chain embeddedness indicators,constructing the core variables index by using the E-market e-commerce website data and combining OECD main national value chain level and e-commerce data with the measurement model,using fixed effects regression,two stage least squares regression analysis.On the basis of the index of substitution,construct for the robustness test and extended analysis.Finally,we conclude that the development of e-commerce at the industry level has significantly promoted the embedding of value chain,and it is still stable after solving the problems of endogeneity and so on.The sixth part is the empirical analysis of the value chain embeddedness in the enterprise level.By merging the industrial enterprise database with the customs database,referring to the related literature of Zhang Jie（2013）and Liu Bin（2015）,the relevant indicators of enterprise level value chain embeddedness are constructed,e-commerce data at the enterprise level of core explanatory variables refer to Report on the Development Level of Electronic Commerce in Provinces and Cities of China 2013 of Ali Research Institute,and then we use the Chinese industrial enterprise database whether the enterprise has URL or mailbox as an alternative index,constructing measurement model,using the tendency matching method,the Heckman two step method and the system GMM method to solve the endogeneity problem.All regression results show that e-commerce development significantly promotes enterprise value chain embeddedness,especially small and medium-sized enterprises,and promotes the upgrading of value chain.The seventh part is the countermeasures and suggestions.Firstly,the contents of the sixth and the seventh chapters are summarized.Secondly,combined with the related empirical results of different industries,different scales of enterprises,different kinds of ownership and other related results,the countermeasures and suggestions of national level,industry level and enterprise level are put forward.The innovation of this article is mainly embodied in three aspects:firstly,the innovation of the perspective of the topic.By analyzing the three perspectives of trade cost,technology spillover and SMEs,this paper studies the impact of e-commerce development on value chain embeddedness,which is the core and the innovation of this paper.The influence of e-commerce on value chain embeddedness is studied from two angles of industry level and enterprise level,and the influence of e-commerce on value chain embeddedness is analyzed under different industries,different enterprise ownership types and different scales of enterprises.According to the results of empirical analysis,this paper puts forward some specific proposals to provide guidance for offline enterprises in China;through analyzing the impact of the development of e-commerce on forward linkage and backward linkage of value chain,this paper assesses the optimal path of Chinese enterprises into the global value chain.Secondly,the innovation of research methods.This paper uses frontier value chain measurement method,such as Upward and KWW method,to measure the embeddedness and division of labor of Chinese enterprises or industries in the global value chain from two perspectives.Considering the problem of endogenous variables,this paper further improves the Upward method.On this basis,this paper analyzes the impact of e-commerce on value chain upgrade of Chinese enterprises,and fully considers the different influences for e-commerce enterprises in China in different industries,with different scales and different ownerships in the global value chain,which provides experience for reference for China’s industrial structure adjustment and the enhancement of competitiveness of enterprises.Thirdly,the innovation of data use.Based on the relevant data from the website E-Marketer,this paper uses Chung（2011）’s bilateral two-way Internet data as a proxy for e-commerce.Different with unilateral one-way Internet data,bilateral two-way Internet data can match value chain embeddedness better,because unilateral one-way data cannot reflect the difference of Internet link between two countries,and bilateral two-way Internet data can measure the correlation between the development difference of e-commerce based on Internet technologies in two countries and the difference of value chain embeddedness more accurately and precisely.In addition,limited by the current literature and statistical data,there are also some shortcomings in this paper.Few literatures researched on the impact of e-commerce development on global value chain embeddedness.The participation in global value chain of different countries and enterprises is influenced by multiple factors,thus analyses which explored by what path e-commerce influences individual global value chain embeddedness are disperse.It is difficult to generalize;in addition,the e-commerce industry is currently in a stage of rapid development.There exists a big uncertainty about the future development trend and direction of the industry,and the impact of e-commerce on the global value chain embeddedness and the countermeasures also need time to test.The data sources of e-commerce development and global value chain upgrading are very limited,and there does not yet exist authoritative distribution channel for the former data.There is not enough experience for the construction of related indicators,which adds obstacles to the research.The difficulties and problems in this study are also mainly focused on its possible innovation.Therefore,in future research,we can improve in terms of improving methods,updating data and refining indicators.