A Study On The Motivation And Performance Of The Change Of Government-Business Relations In The Context Of Digitalization

The government-business relations are the reflection of the economic development model.The role played by the government in the market directly affects the behavioral choices of enterprises in rent-seeking or innovation.China’s longstanding government-led economic development model has resulted in tremendous achievements and serious rent-seeking corruption between government and business.The key to high-quality economic development lies in handling the relationship between the government and the market.The government’s positioning should be shifted to building a public service-oriented government that provides institutional protection for market players,and digital government is an important content and means in this process,meanwhile,as another part of the government-business relationship,the digital transformation of enterprises is also becoming an important process to cultivate new economic development momentum.In the context of the digitalization of both government and enterprises,it is worth testing whether the government-business relationship can be improved and contribute to the high-quality development of the economy.This paper considers digital government as a means to transform government functions from development-oriented to service-oriented,and takes rent-seeking expenditure of enterprises as the key point to build a theoretical basis for digital government to improve government-business relationship.This paper conducts an empirical test using the digital government assessment index from 2015-2019 with data from all A-share listed enterprises in that year,and the results show that digital government construction can significantly inhibit rent-seeking expenditures of enterprises and thus improve the government-business relationship,with stronger inhibitory effects for government transparency and weaker inhibitory effects for government service capacity.The sub-sample regressions show that digital government has a stronger inhibitory effect on private-owned enterprises’ rent-seeking expenditures compared to state-owned enterprises,and this inhibitory effect is significantly reflected in industries with lower barriers and regions with higher marketization.Based on the above theoretical and empirical tests,this paper integrates the increased innovation investment of enterprises with their own digital transformation into the theoretical framework of high-quality economic development,and based on the same sample of enterprises,we obtain that the R&D input and ICT investment of enterprises can form a complementary effect to promote their total factor productivity,and the effect is also more significant in private-owned enterprises.Based on the above findings,this paper proposes the following policy recommendations:(1)In the process of digital government construction,stronger attention should be put into the improvement of government transparency and reduce the information asymmetry between government and enterprises.(2)There is a certain synergy effect between digital government and market access and the degree of marketization,and the optimization of the development environment of private economy needs to continue to promote the expansion of market access and market order regulation.(3)Reasonable use of preferential policies to reduce the cost of digital transformation of private-owned enterprises,encourage private-owned enterprises to attach great importance to ICT investment and actively use its complementary role with R&D investment in promoting high quality economic development.