How to deeply embed the digital economy into the product quality upgrade? The moderating effect of resource allocation
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 15 June 2023
Issue publication date: 30 October 2024
Abstract
Purpose
This paper evaluates the level of the digital economy in Chinese cities based on digital industrialization and industrial digitalization. The research focuses on the effects of spatial mechanism of the urban digital economy on the quality of firms’ exported products.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use the principal component analysis method to evaluate the level of China’s urban digital economy, and spatial metrology to measure the spatial effects of the digital economy on product quality.
Findings
The findings suggest that the urban digital economy can expand the quality of firms’ exports. The digital economy has spatial dependence, spatial spillover and spatial heterogeneity on product quality. At the same time, the spatial effect has a significant nonlinear effect and threshold effect. Further decomposition shows that industrial digitalization is the core factor of enterprises’ export products quality, and the micro-mechanism of this impact is mainly manifested in optimization of resource allocation.
Originality/value
The innovation of this paper is reflected explicitly in exploring the quality upgrading of export products from the background of the digital economy, providing a reference for the improvement of China’s export trade competitiveness and the cultivation of a trade power. The authors studied two different mechanisms (specialization division of labor and optimization of resource allocation) to explain the spatial imbalance of export product quality to provide empirical support for enterprises and government departments to formulate quality upgrading policies accurately.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation under Grant number 17ZDA047.
Citation
Dong, C. and Liu, D. (2024), "How to deeply embed the digital economy into the product quality upgrade? The moderating effect of resource allocation", Kybernetes, Vol. 53 No. 10, pp. 3875-3895. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-11-2022-1619
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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