Digital Product Imports,productivity And Export Product Quality

Digital trade,as an important grip for China to build a new pattern of opening up to the outside world,brings a new opportunity to improve the quality of China’s export products.Although compared with developed countries,China’s digital trade started late,but its development potential and progress space is still large.At the same time,China’s export products have low overall quality and weak international competitiveness,and improving the quality of export products is the key to promoting China’s economic modernization and achieving high-quality economic development.Therefore,from the perspective of China’s digital trade,this paper explores whether imported digital products can have important significance in improving the quality of manufacturing export products,and clarifies the specific mechanism of action from both theoretical and empirical aspects to provide reference for achieving high-quality development.In terms of theoretical research,by reading relevant literature at home and abroad,this paper firstly summarizes and compares four types of literature,namely,digital product imports,export product quality,their mutual influence and enterprise productivity;secondly,on the basis of literature review,we combine the existing research views to investigate the theoretical mechanism of digital product imports affecting export product quality,namely,digital product imports affect export product quality through the mediating effect of technological innovation and product variety diversification,while enterprise productivity plays a moderating role;finally,we propose the theoretical hypothesis of this paper for empirical verification.In terms of empirical research,this paper constructs firm-level panel data from 2000 to2013 for empirical analysis using data from the China Industrial Enterprise Database,the Customs database,and the Newpass.com related data.The explanatory variable in this paper is export product quality and the core explanatory variable is digital product import,and the mechanism tests are conducted by constructing a mediating effect model of technological innovation,product variety diversification and a conditional process model with firm productivity as the moderating variable,respectively.The empirical findings show that(1)in the benchmark regression analysis,digital product imports significantly improve the export product quality of manufacturing enterprises,and the results are still significant after changing the sample scope,variable measurement and other robustness tests;(2)in the heterogeneity test,the study finds that compared with general trade,processing trade and mixed trade have more significant effects on the promotion of digital product imports on export product quality,i.e.,differentiating the types of enterprises will have a differential impact.In terms of trade mode,both digital intermediate and final goods imports promote export product quality to different degrees,but the promotion effect of final goods is more obvious;(3)In the tests of mediating effect and conditional process effect,digital product imports significantly improve export product quality through technological innovation and product variety diversification,and productivity plays a moderating role as a moderating variable.Lastly,on the basis of the results of theory and empirical analysis,three policy recommendations are put forward from different subjects: the state optimizes the digital business environment to provide a foundation for digital trade development;the government plays a guiding role and adopts differentiated policies according to local conditions;enterprises strengthen the digital product import industry and cultivate market innovation subjects.