| In recent years,global digital innovation and iteration have accelerated significantly,and China has introduced a series of policies to proactively promote digital development.As the basic industry of national economic development,manufacturing industry also occupies nearly 90% of China’s foreign trade,which is important for China to promote industrial transformation and upgrading,and promote the highquality development of foreign trade.To this end,China has continuously launched various policies to support the export trade and digital development of manufacturing enterprises,empowering the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries,accelerating the integration of digital technology and the real economy,enhancing the competitiveness of foreign trade enterprises,promoting the optimization of the export portfolio of enterprises,and ultimately achieving a high level of openness to the outside world.Focusing on foreign trade of manufacturing enterprises,this paper studies export diversification from two dimensions: product and market.First,it analyzes the positive effect of digital transformation on export diversification of manufacturing enterprises from a theoretical perspective and proposes the research hypothesis of this paper based on the theoretical content.This paper explains the impact effect of digital transformation on export diversification of manufacturing enterprises from the perspective of enterprise production,operation and innovation,combining theory and enterprise practice,and contributes a new theoretical analysis perspective to the related field.Secondly,this paper empirically investigates the hypotheses proposed in the theoretical analysis section using data from A-share listed manufacturing companies between 2005 and 2016 as a sample,and uses the propensity score matching-double difference method(PSM-DID model)to address the endogeneity problem caused by the self-selection bias of enterprises’ digital transformation,and conducts a robustness test on the research results.Again,this paper argues that in the context of technical limitations of digital transformation,insufficient funds for enterprises,and changing international trade situation,government subsidies can provide enterprises with more external funds,technologies,and other resources,support enterprises to explore international markets more extensively,and enhance their international competitiveness by directly reducing the prices of export products,thus influencing their export portfolio decisions.Therefore,this paper introduces the interaction term between digital transformation and government subsidies Therefore,this paper introduces an interaction term between digital transformation and government subsidies to further explore the moderating effect of government subsidies on digital transformation affecting manufacturing firms’ export diversification.Finally,this paper shows that digital transformation will increase the diversification of export products and export markets of manufacturing firms,and government subsidies will play a positive moderating role in it.Considering the heterogeneity of enterprises,this paper further analyzes that the effect of digital transformation on the level of diversification of export products of manufacturing enterprises is more obvious in the eastern region and non-state enterprises,and the effect of digital transformation on the level of diversification of export markets of manufacturing enterprises is more obvious in the eastern region and non-state enterprises,and the positive moderating effect of government subsidies is also more obvious in the eastern region and non-state enterprises.The positive adjustment effect of government subsidies is also more obvious in the eastern region and non-state enterprises.The above findings provide preliminary empirical evidence for the effect of digital transformation on the export diversification of Chinese manufacturing enterprises,and also provide evidence for the moderating effect of government subsidies.According to the findings of this paper,the author makes suggestions from two perspectives: The government should clarify and give full play to its role in the digital transformation of enterprises,encourage and promote the digital transformation of enterprises by building digital infrastructure and reasonably formulating policies related to digital construction.At the same time,since there are differences in organization scale,operation mode and existing resources among enterprises,the government should do preliminary research when formulating relevant policies,understand the differences in internal and external conditions of enterprises,formulate and adopt reasonable ways to implement policies,and the government also needs to strictly issue standards and supervise subsidies to play a positive role of government subsidies.Enterprises should focus on the introduction and training of digital talents,take the initiative to respond to the changing international market,optimize the export product mix and export market selection,make reasonable decisions to disperse foreign trade risks,and form a sustainable export model. |
