A Study On The Impact Mechanism Of Digital Empowerment On Total Factor Productivity Of Manufacturing Firms

In recent years,China’s economy has moved towards to high-quality development stage.Among other aspects,putting the focus on developing the real economy is a central point in achieving high-quality development of the national economy.Along with the development and application of emerging digital technologies,digitization is seen as one of the main development trends that will transform the social and business environment in the near future,driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution Simultaneously,despite its strong economic dimension,the traditional manufacturing industry still suffers from a weakened low-cost advantage,insufficient independent innovation,inefficient production and supply,and backward production management efficiency.At the same time,the outbreak of the COVID-19 has also restrained the growth of our economy in a certain degree,presenting new challenges for the development of our manufacturing industry.For this reason,the traditional manufacturing industry has to be deeply merged with digitization to accomplish the historical transition of China’s manufacturing industry from bigger to stronger,which also implies that China must transform and upgrade its manufacturing enterprises via digital empowerment.To verify whether digital empowerment can enhance the total factor productivity of enterprises,this article takes A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2011 to 2020 as the research object,and firstly constructs a digital feature lexicon based on the documents related to the digitization of enterprises,matches and counts the word frequencies of the data pool formed by the annual reports of listed companies through the Python,The total word frequency was logarithmically processed to form the digital empowerment extent,which was used to measure the transformation of digitally empowered enterprises.Secondly,the OLS method with fixed effects correction is used to calculate the total factor productivity of enterprises and describe the trend of total factor productivity of statistical enterprises.Finally,the influence of digital empowerment to total factor productivity in the manufacturing industry is empirically examined and explored by the econometric model.This report shows that digital empowerment has improved total factor productivity in the manufacturing industry,and the repercussion of digital empowerment on total factor productivity is more significant in the central and western regions.after 2015,the impression of digital empowerment on total factor productivity is more significant.In resource-intensive industries,digital empowerment has a more significant impact on total factor productivity.The finding that digital empowerment has become a new driver of productivity improvement in the manufacturing sector holds true after a series of tests.The empirical tests found that digital empowerment can improve total factor productivity via three mediating channels:optimizing firm resource allocation,reducing firm costs and promoting firm innovation.On this basis,this paper will put forward relevant suggestions that can help manufacturing enterprises to digitally empower and improve their productivity.