| In recent years,the countries around the world have gradually endowed digital economy to the development of all walks of life.With its high innovation,strong penetration,and wide coverage,the digital economy not only promotes the high quality development of our economy,but also becomes the key fulcrum for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries,and is a new engine for our country to construct a modernized economic system.In this wave,our foreign trade continues to develop well,but still faces severe tests.How to break through China’s traditional trade structure has become an urgent problem to be solved.Therefore,we must make every effort to promote the transformation and upgrading of our foreign trade structure.Based on this background,some FTZ has given priority to the development of digital economy in their overall plan,the innovative development of digital economy can provide new momentum for the upgrading of trade structure,and seizing digital opportunities to promote the optimization of foreign trade structure is an important way to enhance a country’s international status.This paper takes whether the development of digital economy affects the upgrading of trade structure as the main research line.Firstly,this paper reviews relevant literature and theoretically explains that digital economy can promote the upgrading of trade structure,but there are also stages.Digital economy indirectly affects the upgrading of trade structure through three transmission mechanisms: tradable effect,green trade effect and factor marketization effect.At the same time,the establishment of FTZ positively moderates this process.Secondly,this paper uses the relevant data of 31 provinces and cities in China from 2010 to 2021 to construct a comprehensive evaluation index of the development level of digital economy,uses the entropy method to empower and evaluate the relevant data,and explores the development and change.The index of upgrading trade structure is analyzed by referring to the calculation methods of previous scholars.Third,on this basis,a series of empirical tests are conducted on provincial panel data by comprehensive use of fixed effect model,mechanism analysis model,threshold panel model and moderating effect model,and the conclusions are as follows:(1)Digital economy can obviously enhance the level of China’s foreign trade structure,but the influence has non-linear characteristics.With the development of digital economy,its promoting effect on the upgrading of trade structure will be weakened;(2)Digital economy indirectly promotes the upgrading of our trade structure through tradable effect and green trade effect,but factor marketization effect is not obvious;(3)The establishment of FTZ plays a significant positive role in the process of upgrading our foreign trade structure with the development of digital economy;(4)There is regional heterogeneity in the direct effects of this paper.The digital economy in the eastern and western regions can significantly improve the trade structure,but not in the central region.Meanwhile,there is also heterogeneity in the direct effects at different levels of trade structure upgrading.In the end,this paper puts forward some suggestions based on the empirical results: Our country should strengthen the digital economy infrastructure construction,pay attention to capital investment and the output of knowledge and technology innovation,strengthen the talent education of digital economy,accelerate the construction of cross-border e-commerce platforms,vigorously develop green and low-carbon technologies,and promote the innovative development of FTZ system. |
