数字化转型能否推动中国企业进口扩大——来自上市公司的经验分析

Does Digital Transformation Promote Chinese Manufacturing Firm's Imports?Evidence from Listed Cooperation

积极扩大进口对助推我国内需扩大和消费升级、促进贸易平衡、保障产业链供应链稳定具有重要战略意义。文章通过整合2007—2016年中国海关数据库和沪深A股制造业上市公司数据,并将其与利用机器学习方法提取上市公司年报文本构建的企业数字化转型指标进行合并,系统考察了数字化转型对企业进口规模的影响效应及其作用机制。研究发现,企业数字化转型显著促进了企业进口规模扩张,且这一影响效应呈现边际递减特征,对进口规模较小的企业最为明显。机制分析表明,数字化转型通过降低外部交易成本、推动企业生产技术升级和生产规模扩张三个途径来促进企业进口,从进口构成上来看,数字化转型对企业进口额的促进作用主要源于国家层面和产品层面的进口集约边际和进口产品种类的增加。异质性分析表明,数字化转型对不同类型企业和产品的影响存在显著差异,主要推动了出口企业、民营企业、加工贸易企业以及中间品的进口扩张。进一步研究发现,数字化还有助于提升企业进口概率、延长进口持续时间以及提高进口产品质量和技术类产品进口份额。文章为数字经济背景下主动扩大进口研究提供了新的视角,对于进一步加快推进数字经济高质量发展和实现高水平对外开放具有重要的政策启示。

Expanding imports actively has important strategic significance for boosting domestic demand and consumption up⁃grading,promoting trade balance,and ensuring the stability of industrial and supply chains in China.This paper integrates the China Customs Database and the A-share Manufacturing Listed Companies Database from 2007 to 2016,and merges them with the Enterprise Digital Transformation Index constructed by extracting the annual report text of listed companies us⁃ing machine learning methods.It systematically examines the impact of digital transformation on enterprise import scale and its mechanism.The study finds that enterprise digital transformation significantly promotes the expansion of enterprise import scale,and this effect shows a marginal diminishing feature,which is most obvious for enterprises with small import scale.The mecha⁃nism analysis shows that digital transformation promotes enterprise imports through three channels:reducing external transac⁃tion costs,promoting enterprise production technology upgrading and production scale expansion.From the perspective of im⁃port composition,the promotion effect of digital transformation on enterprise import value mainly comes from the increase of import intensive margin at the national level and product level and the increase of import product variety.The heterogeneity analysis shows that digital transformation has heterogeneous effects on different types of enterprises and products,mainly driv⁃ing the import expansion of exports enterprises,private enterprises,processing trade enterprises and intermediate goods.Fur⁃ther research finds that digitalization also helps to increase the probability of enterprise imports,extend the duration of im⁃ports,and improve the quality of imported products and the share of technology products imports.This paper provides a new perspective for the research on expanding imports actively in the context of digital economy,and has important policy implica⁃tions for further accelerating the high-quality development of digital economy and achieving a high level of opening up to the outside world.