Research On The Impact Of Digital Enabling On Tea Export Quality In China Tea Industry

China is a major tea growing and exporting country in the world,but the tea export volume has been growing slowly in recent years,and the export quality of tea is not high.With the increasing requirements of tea quality standards in the world,how to improve the export quality of tea has become an urgent issue.At the same time,China’s digital economy is developing rapidly,and China Tea Circulation Association proposed in the "China’s 14 th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Tea Industry" to accelerate the construction of a tea industry Internet platform based on tea quality,and promote the transformation of the tea industry to digital intelligence.Digital empowerment has become an inevitable trend for the transformation of the tea industry,through the digital empowerment of the tea industry to achieve tea export of China from "quantitative increase" to "qualitative leap",so as to promote the high-quality development of China’s tea industry.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the influence of digital empowerment of China’s tea industry on the export quality of tea to improve the quality of China’s tea exports and promote the high-quality development of China’s tea industry.In this paper,17 major tea-producing provinces in China(Jiangsu,Zhejiang,Anhui,Fujian,Jiangxi,Shandong,Henan,Hubei,Hunan,Guangdong,Guangxi,Hainan,Chongqing,Sichuan,Guizhou,Yunnan,Shaanxi)during 2017-2021 are taken as research objects.The tea export quality exported from 17 major tea-producing provinces in China to different countries(101 in total)was calculated by using the demand information backward extrapolation method as the explained variable.After constructing the comprehensive index of digital empowerment of tea industry,the digitalization empowerment of tea industry in 17 major tea-producing provinces in China was calculated by the entropy method as the core explanatory variable.Then,the fixed effect model was established for empirical analysis.The results of the empirical study show that: First,the digitalization of tea industry can significantly promote the improvement of tea export quality,and the conclusion is still valid after the endogeneity test and the robustness test.Secondly,the influence of digitalization empowerment on tea export quality in different tea regions is heterogeneous,which significantly promotes the tea export quality in Jiangbei tea region,Jiangnan tea region and South China tea region,but has no significant effect on the tea export quality in Southwest tea region.Thirdly,digital empowerment of tea industry has great differences on the export quality of different tea.It has a significant promoting effect on the export quality of green tea,black tea and flower tea,but has no significant promoting effect on the export quality of Pu ’er tea,and has an inhibiting effect on the export quality of oolong tea.Fourth,the digital application of tea industry has the greatest impact on tea export quality,followed by the digital trade and digital production of tea industry,and finally the digital support of tea industry.This indicates that major tea-producing tea provinces have not invested enough in the digital production of tea industry to give full play to the role of digital production of tea industry in improving tea export quality.Besides,there is little support in the capital and technology of the digital tea industry so that the promotion effect is not significant enough.Finally,through the influence mechanism test,both the productivity of the tea industry and the tea trade cost can enhance the degree to which the digitalization of the tea industry can improve the tea export quality.Based on the empirical conclusions,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations: First,increase the investment in tea industry digitalization capital and technology to provide guarantee for the development of tea industry digitalization;Secondly,pay attention to high-quality talents in the tea industry,not only cultivate high-quality new talents in the tea industry,but also accept traditional tea farmers’ talents to promote innovative development of the tea industry and improve the productivity of tea industry.Third,timely understanding of tea quality standards of various countries to avoid the waste of tea resources;Fourthly,the use of digital empowerment is devoted to upgrading the export quality of all kinds of Chinese tea and promoting the improvement of the overall export quality of Chinese tea.