Digital Inclusion and Export Performance: Gendered Impacts of E‐Commerce Adoption in Chinese MSEs

Digital inclusion has emerged as a core driver of cross‐border e‐commerce export growth; nevertheless, the internal mechanisms through which e‐commerce empowers MSEs to conduct export activities, as well as the potential gender‐differentiated pathways, await in‐depth investigation. Drawing on the 2015 China Micro and Small Enterprises Survey data, this paper carries out an empirical analysis and yields three core research findings. First, e‐commerce significantly enhances MSEs’ capacity for export participation, with no significant gender disparity observed in this effect, and this conclusion remains robust after resolving potential endogeneity and self‐selection bias problems. Second, the export empowerment effect of e‐commerce presents significant gender heterogeneity with distinct variations in empowerment pathways: at the market access level, e‐commerce lowers the skill threshold for male‐led firms to enter export markets while alleviating the credit constraints faced by female‐led firms; at the market performance level, male‐led firms expand their export scale by utilizing e‐commerce for procurement to reduce dependence on supplier networks and for sales to lower marketing costs, whereas female‐led firms can only demonstrate the export empowerment effect through e‐commerce sales activities. Third, regional disparities in digital inclusion—especially those in the coverage of digital finance—give rise to a gender gap in the export empowerment effect of e‐commerce. This study provides crucial empirical evidence for the re‐evaluation of China’s trade‐related digital inclusion policies and contributes to filling the research gap in the field of digital inclusion and gender differences in firm exports.