A Study On The Impact Of Digital Trade Development On Regional Industrial Upgrading In China

With the rapid development of the new generation of information technology,the convenience of trade and tradability of services have been greatly improved.Digital trade has gradually become a new growth point of global trade and an important driving force for the transformation of China’s economy from high-speed growth to high-quality growth.In addition,as China’s economy enters the "new normal" and economic growth is at a time of transformation between old and new kinetic energy,industrial upgrading is the only way for China to achieve high-quality development.As the main trade form in the development of the digital economy era,the development of digital trade has brought new opportunities for China’s industrial upgrading.However,at present,the research related to digital trade is less and immature,and there is little literature to link digital trade with industrial upgrading.Therefore,the research on the impact of China’s digital trade development on regional industrial upgrading has certain theoretical and practical significance.Firstly,this thesis combs the relevant theories of Digital Trade and industrial upgrading,and obtains a series of inferences by constructing a model;Secondly,this thesis uses the entropy weight method to construct the evaluation index system to calculate the development level of digital trade in each province,and also calculates the industrial upgrading index of each province,and makes descriptive statistical analysis and basic correlation analysis between them;Then,the benchmark regression results are obtained by panel data regression.On this basis,the instrumental variable method is used to overcome the possible endogenous problems,and the robustness is tested by changing the variable measurement method,quantile regression and tail reduction and truncation;Then,this thesis uses the intermediary effect model to test the mechanism,and analyzes the heterogeneity by sub sample regression;Finally,this thesis summarizes the relevant empirical results,and puts forward the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions on this basis.The results of this thesis show that: first,from the perspective of various provinces in China,the development level of digital trade and industrial upgrading index of 31 provinces are steadily improving from 2014 to 2020,but the situation is strong in the East and weak in the West.There is still a large development space for digital trade and industrial upgrading in the central and western regions.Second,the development of China’s digital trade can significantly promote regional industrial upgrading,and this effect is still significantly positive under a series of robustness tests.Third,the promotion power of the development of digital trade to industrial upgrading mainly comes from the optimization of the allocation of resources among industries within the region.Its specific intermediary mechanism is the level of human capital and the level of R&D investment.Fourth,compared with the eastern region and low urbanization region,the central and western regions and high urbanization regions can get more dividends from the development of digital trade,so as to narrow the gap between backward and developed regions and promote the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure.