The Impact Of Digital Transformation On Manufacturing Firms’ Export Resilience

Since the 21 st century,the international situation has become increasingly complicated,and the foreign trade situation has turned grim.For Chinese manufacturing firms,the loss of traditional manufacturing advantages and the prominence of manufacturing shortcomings have brought significant challenges to their exports.Resilience as a strong support to prevent risks,enhancing export resilience has become an important guarantee for firms to adapt to the new situation.At a time when the world is experiencing a transformation of new generation digital technology represented by big data and others,for realizing the transformation from "a manufacturing big country" to "a manufacturing powerful country",China is seizing this development opportunity and promoting the deep integration of the digital economy and real economy.Therefore,grasping the development trend of digital transformation and export resilience of Chinese manufacturing firms,and understanding the intrinsic connection between the two,is of great practical significance in promoting the stability of China’s foreign trade.However,there is still a lack of related research on the impact of digital transformation on export resilience,which needs to be explored.Firstly,analyze the impact and internal mechanism of digital transformation on export resilience with endogenous growth theory and transaction cost theory as support,based on combing and summarizing the existing research literature.Secondly,taking 839 China’s Ashare manufacturing listed firms as the research target and 2009-2021 as the research period to analyze the development characteristics of digital transformation and export resilience.Specifically,the measurement method of digital transformation is to construct a digital transformation keyword lexicon,using text analysis to mine the valid information in the annual reports collected by Python,and counting the frequency of digital transformation keywords;the measurement method of export resilience is to construct a comprehensive evaluation index system with three dimensions of resistance,recovery and upgrading,and use the entropy evaluation method to calculate the comprehensive score.Furthermore,constructing a two-way fixed effects model to empirically test the impact and paths of digital transformation on export resilience.Selecting "the length of long distance fiber optic cable lines" and "number of Internet broadband access ports" as instrumental variables to mitigate the endogenous problem by the two-stage least squares.The main conclusions are as follows.(1)On the one hand,digital transformation showed an upward trend,especially after 2013;the development of "digital technology application" has increased more than "underlying technology architecture";the development gap of digital transformation between individuals is large.On the other hand,export resilience is also increasing year by year,but the overall performance is not as good,the increase is small and unstable;from the recovery of export value compared to 2008,nearly 50% of the sample firms recovered to their original level within a year,while 21 firms have not yet recovered during the research period.In addition,there is a certain heterogeneity in different regions,ownership,and the types of manufacturing industry.(2)Digital transformation significantly improve export resilience,for every 1 unit increase in digital transformation,the three dimensions of resistance,recovery and upgrading will increase by 0.0206 units,0.0290 units,and 0.0260 units respectively;it remains significantly positive after endogenous treatment and robustness testing;the results of heterogeneity analysis show that digital transformation has a more pronounced impact on enhancing the export resilience of eastern firms,state-owned firms,and technologyintensive firms.(3)There are two impact paths in which digital transformation improve export resilience,improving production efficiency and reducing transaction costs,specifically,it is more effective in reducing internal transaction costs.Finally,according to the research conclusions,corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are put forward from the firms’ micro level and governments’ macro level,to give full play to the positive impact of digital transformation in improving export resilience.Encouraging firms to transform gradually from three aspects: “planning top-level strategies,outlining digital transformation blueprints”,“cultivating digital talents,facilitating the implementation of digital transformation”,and “enabling business with technology,promoting digital transformation”.Encouraging government to support firms’ digital transformation by“optimizing the market environment,creating a good digital ecosystem” and “increasing financial support,ensuring the supply of digital talents”.