High-quality exporting in the digital economy

In the age of new sci-tech revolution, digitalization has played a major role in promoting corporate international competitiveness. This study aims to evaluate the effect of digital economy on domestic value added ratio (DVAR) for exporting enterprises by investigating China’s manufacturing firms in 2011 to 2015. Results show that the development of digital economy significantly promotes enterprises’ DVARs under a series of robustness checks. Furthermore, there exist heterogeneous effects with the eastern coastal region, non-state-owned enterprises, and capital-intensive enterprises showing strongly positive effects. In order to unveil the possible channel, we explore three aspects: the intensive margin, the extensive margin—where the former points to innovation of existing exporters and the latter points to new exporting participants with high DVARs—and the product quality. It suggests that both intensive and extensive margins play a positive role, and the improvement of the quality of exported finished goods stays even stronger than that of imported intermediate goods due to the digital economy. All these effects jointly impel the enhancement of corporate DVAR.