Research On The Impact Of Smart City Construction On City Export Trade

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has shown a blowout development,and the rapid development of China’s economy cannot be separated from the pull of export trade.However,in recent years,as one of the "troika" driving China’s economic growth,the growth rate of exports has gradually slowed down,and with the increasing uncertainty of the international trade environment and the gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend,the growth rate of exports may continue to decline in the future.In this background,China urgently needs to find new momentum for export trade development.As the core carrier to promote economic development,cities contribute greatly to the development of national foreign trade,while smart cities,as the advanced form of future urban development,have an important impact on the development of urban export trade.Since 2012,China has formally implemented the work of smart city construction,and has always taken smart city construction as an important development strategy for China.Therefore,this paper examines the impact of smart city construction on urban export trade,which is of great significance for China to effectively implement smart city construction and explore new dynamics of foreign trade growth.This paper treats smart city construction as a quasi-natural experiment,based on the panel data of 220 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2020,and empirically tests the effect of smart city construction on city export trade by constructing a multiperiod double difference model,and further examines whether the three influence mechanisms of technological innovation effect,infrastructure construction and informationization level hold true in combination with the mediating effect model,and then analyzes the heterogeneity of the effect of smart city construction on export trade from two aspects of different regions and levels of cities based on the variability of the effect of smart city construction,and finally puts forward targeted policy recommendations based on the conclusions obtained.There are the main findings of this paper :(1)The baseline regression finds that smart city construction can significantly promote the growth of city export scale,but there is a two-year lag in its effect;(2)The results of the mechanism test found that there are mediating effects of technological innovation effect,infrastructure construction and informationization level,indicating that smart city construction can promote the growth of city export trade scale through technological innovation effect,infrastructure construction and informationization level.(3)Heterogeneity test results found that,from the perspective of regional heterogeneity,smart city construction has a significant promotion effect on the export trade of central and western cities,but no significant impact on the export trade of eastern cities;From the perspective of city level heterogeneity,smart city construction has a significant positive promotion effect on the export trade of both high-grade cities and low-grade cities,and this promotion effect has the characteristic of diminishing marginal effect,and the promotion effect on the export trade of low-grade cities is significantly greater than that of high-grade cities.