The Impact of Digital Transformation on the High-quality Development of the Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

The digital transformation of manufacturing industry facilitates enterprises to access and utilize data information to improve the efficiency of resource allocation, expand product and service business models, and accumulate human capital stock to empower the high- quality development of manufacturing industry by creating a large number of databases. This paper adopts panel data of 30 provinces and cities in China from 2011-2020, and uses system GMM to verify the correlation between two variables. It also introduces environmental regulation as a threshold variable to analyze the threshold effect. The results of the study indicated that: firstly, the association between digital transformation of manufacturing industry and high-quality development of manufacturing industry shows a U-shaped relationship, secondly, the digitalization of manufacturing industry exhibits different impact effects on the four dimensions of high-quality development of manufacturing industry, and lastly, only when the environmental regulation is within a certain level, it can have a driving effect on high-quality development of manufacturing industry. Therefore, it is important to grasp the strategic opportunities of digital economy, strengthen the integration of digital economy and traditional industries, accelerate the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises, and improve the high-quality development of China's manufacturing industry.