跨境电子商务与市域协调发展——兼论跨境电商的普惠逻辑

Cross-border E-commerce and Intra-city Coordinated Development:The Logic of Inclusiveness of Cross-border E-commerce

随着中国进入扎实推动共同富裕的新阶段,如何提升市域尺度即城市内部的协调发展水平已成为兼具理论和现实意义的难题。鉴于跨境电子商务具有极强的普惠性特征,本文结合跨境电商运单数据和夜间灯光栅格数据,首次探讨了跨境电商对市域协调发展的影响,研究表明:(1)城市发展跨境电商能提升其内部协调发展水平,且在使用城市与跨境电商综试区的平均距离和对跨境电商平台的关注度两类工具变量后,该结论依然稳健;(2)激活欠发达区县成本优势、缓解中高端劳动力分布不均和弥合县际信息鸿沟是跨境电商促进市域协调发展的关键普惠机制;(3)异质性分析表明,跨境电商的积极作用对中西部、交通承载能力强和政府干预力度大的城市更显著;(4)跨境电商的积极作用不仅同时适用于省域尺度,且兼容于城乡维度,还具有包容性增长特质,但却受制于城市的“中心-外围”格局。因此,政府应通过优化跨境电商制度环境和建设跨境电商配套设施,在扎实推动共同富裕过程中继续发挥“有形之手”的积极作用。

As China enters a new stage of solidly promoting common prosperity,how to promote intra-city coordinated development has become a challenge of both theoretical and practical significance.Given that cross-border e-commerce(CBEC)has a strong character of inclusiveness,this paper explores the impact of CBEC on intra-city coordinated development.In terms of indicator design,due to the lack of economic and social data at the county and sub-county levels in China,while nighttime light grid data boasts extensive coverage,high resolution,and frequent updates,this paper calculates the disparities in nighttime light brightness among counties to quantify intra-city coordinated development.Leveraging the waybill database of Sunyou Logistics,a leading CBEC logistics company in China,this paper proxies the CBEC development using the total CBEC export value in each city.Benefiting from the high frequency of the aforementioned data,this paper ultimately constructs a dataset at the city-year-month level.The baseline results indicate that the development of CBEC by a city can enhance coordinated development within it.This conclusion remains robust when using two types of instrument variables,namely,the average distance of a city from the CBEC comprehensive pilot zones and a city's attention to the CBEC platform.Mechanism test results demonstrate that activating the cost advantages of underdeveloped counties,alleviating the uneven distribution of middle-and-high-end labor,and bridging the inter-county information gap are key mechanisms through which CBEC promotes coordinated development.In the expanded analysis,group regression results show that the positive effect of CBEC is more significant in cities in the central and western regions and cities with stronger transportation carrying capacity or government intervention.This paper also attempts to incorporate analyses in other dimensions and finds that the positive impact of CBEC not only applies at the provincial level,but also is compatible with the urban-rural dimension,demonstrating characteristics of inclusive growth.However,it is subject to the“center-periphery”pattern of a city.The policy implications of this paper are as follows.As the“visible hand”,governments should continue to play an active role in promoting common prosperity through the CBEC industry.On one hand,governments should optimize the institutional environment for CBEC by enhancing talent cultivation and encouraging differentiated development of the CBEC industry tailored to local conditions.On the other hand,governments should vigorously invest in infrastructure related to networks,computing power,and logistics to improve the supporting industries for CBEC.The theoretical contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows.First of all,it is the first study to examine the impact of CBEC on regional coordinated development using waybill data.This not only improves the research framework under the topic of regional coordinated development but also expands the theoretical boundaries of the inclusiveness of CBEC.Secondly,this paper is one of the few studies at the intra-city level within the field of regional coordinated development.Additionally,it introduces the dimension of months,providing reference for subsequent research.Thirdly,this paper provides a detailed exposition of the outward manifestations and limitations of the inclusiveness of CBEC.Moreover,it constructs a large number of economic and social indicators based on geographic information system(GIS)data such as point of interest(POI)data and artificial impervious areas(AIA)data,contributing to a solid academic foundation for future research on intra-city coordinated development.