Empirical Research For Effects Of E-commerce Level Of Listed Manufacturing Companies In Fujian On Their Export Behavior

Recently the effects of e-commerce on firm behavior became a new topic in the field of international trade,studying the topic makes sense to making strategies for exporting and applying e-commerce especially in the background that the foreign trade of China grew slowly while cross-border trade grew fast.Foreign research mostly studied the effects of e-commerce on the level of country or industry,but seldom on the level of firm.Chinese research was still in the stage of describing the phenomenon lacking theoretical and empirical research.This paper mainly discussed how e-commerce impacts export probability of firm and export intensity of firm in theoretical and empirical way which enriched studies on the level of firm in this field.Firstly,this paper built frameworks by reviewing relevant concepts of e-commerce and export behavior of firm.In addition,this paper reviewed theoretical studies about transaction cost and found that overlarge transaction cost hinders the occurrence of trade.The application of e-commerce reduces transaction cost of firm remarkably,thus this paper raised two hypotheses which were the application of e-commerce promotes export probability and export intensity of firm.Based on the hypotheses,this paper conducted theoretical and empirical analysis.Secondly,this paper measured e-commerce level of 53 manufacturing firms in Fujian.The results showed that firms mainly applied e-commerce in news release,products exhibition and supply chain management but seldom in online payment or building trading platform.Among 18 sub-sectors,textile clothing,shoes,hats product industry and transport equipment manufacturing industry had the highest e-commerce level while printing industry and wood,bamboo,rattan,palm,grass products industry had the lowest e-commerce level.Finally,this paper studied whether e-commerce promotes export probability of firm and export intensity of firm.The result showed that e-commerce level has positive effects on export probability and export intensity of firm which supports the hypotheses.This paper found that e-commerce reduces transaction cost,thus the export probability and export intensity of firm increase resulting in enhancing the cost advantage of manufacturing firms in Fujian.In addition,the result indicated that there was no productivity paradox which agrees to the conclusion of the new new trade theory,productivity has a positive effect on export probability,but had no effect on export intensity once the firm exported.Different from the new trade theory,this paper found that firm size has a negative effect on export probability of firm,because intra-product specialization makes firms smaller.On the other hand,exporting companies in Fujian were almost in middle or small size,firm size did not impact export intensity of firm.Besides,the paper found the investment of research and development,the proportion of foreign investments,salary level and capital-intensity had little effect on export probability and export intensity of firm.The contributions of this paper include 1)Build an index system for measuring e-commerce level of firm which gave a solution to assessing e-commerce level on the level of firm.2)This paper analyzed the effects of e-commerce level of firm on their export behavior in empirical way which enriched research on the level of firm.