Research On The Impact Of Information Friction On Chinese Enterprises’ Export Trade

With the development of Internet and mobile communication technology,people have gradually diversified and convenient ways to obtain information,and can quickly search for the goods or services they need globally.However,due to many unstable factors such as the slowdown of global economic growth,the contraction of world market,the intensification of the game between big powers,countries have resorted to trade protectionism,leading to the escalation of trade frictions.Under the background of the current information age,the impact brought by direct friction such as transportation cost,tariff policy and license are weakening.International trade is more dependent on the dissemination of information and exchanges between traders.Insufficient information between traders is likely to cause trade friction in religious belief,institutional background,family relationship,language and other aspects.This kind of indirect trade friction is an important cause for the setback of enterprises’ export trade development,and its negative impact on international trade and market integration is even bigger than direct friction.The reduction of the degree of information friction is conducive to the effective integration and sharing of trade information resources,the increase of enterprise information ownership,and the reduction of export uncertainty and export risk.So,it is significant to study the impact of information frictions on the export trade of Chinese enterprises.In terms of export trade,this paper measures the export trade of enterprises in terms of both quantity and quality,uses the export volume of enterprises to measure the export scale,and uses the demand residual method of Khandelwal et al.(2013)for reference to measure the export product quality of enterprises.In terms of information friction,this paper draws on the information Development Index(IDI)system set by the Scientific Institute of the National Bureau of Statistics,combines the definition of information friction and the characteristics of various regions in China,and introduces new indicators such as technology acquisition,technology transformation and human resources on the basis of retaining the main indicators,and finally forms a comprehensive index system of information friction.Then the analysis of the calculated index is carried out.The research finds that:(1)there are four problems and challenges in the present stage of Chinese export trade,such as the loss of demographic dividend,lack of trade competitiveness,complex external environment and the improvement of trade quality entering the bottleneck period;(2)From 2009 to 2020,the degree of information friction decreases continuously,but the degree of information friction has obvious regional differences.The degree of information friction in the eastern region is relatively low,while the degree of information friction in the central and western regions is relatively high on the whole.However,the difference between the central and western regions is narrowing at a fast speed.This lays a foundation for quantitative analysis of the influence of information friction on export trade.In terms of theoretical mechanism,this paper innovatively includes information friction into the classical heterogeneous firm trade theory,and studies the influence mechanism of information friction on firm export trade through mathematical derivation.In the empirical aspect,this paper uses the Chinese industrial enterprise database and the customs import and export database to carry out the double fixed effect model regression in terms of export scale and export quality,and conducts robustness test and heterogeneity analysis of the model by eliminating extreme values of key variables,changing the measurement method of core variables,and grouping regression.The final research results show that:(1)The degree of information friction is negatively correlated with the export scale and export quality of enterprises.When the information friction index increases by 1,the quality of enterprises’ export products will decrease by 0.396 and the export scale will decrease by 66.5%.(2)Information friction has a greater negative impact on the export scale and export product quality of enterprises in eastern China;(3)Information friction will hinder the development of export scale and export quality in both high-tech and low-tech industries,and the degree of information friction has a greater negative impact on high-tech industries.Based on the above theoretical and empirical results,it is found that the negative effect of information friction on the export trade of Chinese enterprises is obvious,and reducing the degree of information friction is of great significance to the sustainable development of export trade of Chinese enterprises.Therefore,this paper puts forward three suggestions:(1)attach importance to the development of the information industry and release the vitality of the information industry according to local conditions;(2)Promote the integrated development of various fields and give full play to the service value of information technology;(3)Establish an official statistical system of information friction to dynamically observe the degree of information friction.Compared with the existing literature,this paper has certain novelties in the research method,by combing the literature and summarizing and summarizing,clarifying the concept of information friction,and constructing a comprehensive index system to measure information friction,indexing information friction that is difficult to directly observe,and quantitatively analyzing its impact on the scale and quality of export trade of enterprises.In addition,this paper expands the research perspective,based on microdata,integrates information friction into the trade theory of heterogeneous enterprises,and enriches and improves the existing research.