Digital transformation by firms and the cleanliness of China's export products

Abstract

This study breaks the research chain on “firm digital transformation-trade green transformation”, focusing on the effect and mechanism in firms' digital transformation on the “cleanliness” of export products. It offers theoretical and empirical support on how to respond to demand for a green transformation in trade by firms in the context of their digital transformation. First, we reveal the mechanism in the effect of firms' digital transformation on export product cleanliness at the theoretical level by extending the Stackelberg game model and constructing a variable for product cleanliness. Second, we build an index to evaluate firms' digital transformation by matching data on A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2016 with a China Customs firm database and quantitatively analyze it with a machine learning algorithm. Combined with the measured export product cleanliness index, this mechanism is empirically tested with standardized measurement methods. Overall, we find that firms' digital transformation can significantly contribute to improvement in export product cleanliness. This finding remains robust to a series of tests and decomposition of digital transformation into various dimensions. The mechanism test found that the digital transformation of firms mainly promotes the improvement of export product cleanliness through the channels of increasing digital factor inputs, promoting green technology innovation, improving environmental management performance and achieving economies of scale. Heterogeneity analysis shows that digital transformation better facilitates the promotion of cleaner exported products from firms certified with ISO14001, whose primary export destinations are countries outside of the EU, and with high disclosure quality. Furthermore, digital transformation has a structural effect on the improvement of export product cleanliness in the context of urban disclosure of environmental information.