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The purpose of this study is to explore the effect and mechanism of the digital economy’s influence on the binary margin of agricultural exports.

Based on the theoretical analysis of the mechanism of the digital economy’s influence on the binary margin of agricultural exports, this study empirically examines the effect and mechanism of the digital economy’s influence on the binary margin of agricultural exports based on China’s customs export data from 2011 to 2016.

The relevant findings are threefold. (1) The digital economy significantly improves the binary margin of agricultural exports, and its effect on the intensive margin is stronger than that on the expansive margin. After the expansive margin is subdivided, the effects on the three sub-variables of the expansive margin are in the following order: old products exported to new markets > new products exported to old markets > new products exported to new markets. (2) The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the digital economy has a stronger role in promoting the binary margin of exports for enterprises in the eastern region, high-income countries as the destination of exports and state-owned enterprises. (3) Mechanism analysis shows that the digital economy promotes the binary margin of agricultural exports by reducing trade costs and intensifying market competition.

First, in terms of research perspective, although there are some studies on the impact of the digital economy on export trade in existing literature, the research objects mainly focus on manufacturing enterprises. In fact, agricultural trade is susceptible to natural conditions and seasonal factors, and countries may impose more SPS measures and TBT measures on agricultural trade due to risk considerations. The relationship between the digital economy and agricultural trade also has its own characteristics, but there are few research studies in this area. At present, only Liu and Gao (2022), based on the data of total imports and exports of different agricultural products from 2004 to 2018, have established a vector auto-regressive model to empirically analyse the heterogeneous dynamic impact of the digital economy on the trade volume of agricultural products. In addition, Ma and Guo (2023) conducted an empirical test on the total effect, regional heterogeneity and threshold effect of the digital economy on agricultural export trade based on China’s provincial panel data from 2011 to 2020. Therefore, under the new circumstances of continuous integration of digital technology and agriculture, this study interprets the impact effect and mechanism of the digital economy on the binary margin of agricultural exports from the perspective of the digital economy, providing new research perspectives and approaches for promoting the growth of agricultural exports. Second, in terms of theoretical analysis, the above studies have not been fully analysed in terms of the specific mechanism of the impact of the digital economy on agricultural exports. Based on the positive and negative characteristics of agricultural trade, this study introduces two kinds of roles into the theoretical analysis framework to comprehensively determine the trade impact effect of the digital economy. Third, in terms of research design, this study empirically examines the impact of the digital economy on the binary margin of agricultural products, passing a series of robustness tests and investigating the mediating roles of trade cost and market competition effects, producing an empirical basis for China to leverage the digital economy to promote the binary margin of agricultural exports.

This study aims to find how trade development and digitalization affect smart-green production. Four factors are investigated in these effects (certification, technology innovation, natural resource management, low pesticides).

The mix-method approach was employed from validating the measurement scale to test the proposed hypotheses. At first, the grounded theory is the most authoritative and standard research method in qualitative research. Secondly, quantitative analysis was employed to draw conclusions about the impact of digitalization and trade development on smart-green agricultural production.

The results found that digitalization and trade development impact the development of smart-green agricultural production through certification employment, technology innovation, and a decrease in pesticide usage. Moreover, digitalization and trade development also indirectly affect the development of intelligent green agricultural production. Meanwhile, digitalization has a higher impact than trade development.

This research is based on the premise that digitalization and trade development can drive smart green agricultural production. Still, some studies have found a deviation between trade development and environmental protection. Hence, future research can explore the incentive effect of trade development and digitalization on other industries. Second, the measurement of the dependent variables in this study is based on the premise that smart-green agricultural production has not been widely promoted, so the changes in production before and after the whole public participation in smart-green output have yet to be reflected.

Smart green production in agriculture is essential for a transition economy and the world to meet food security and protect the environment. However, the effects of certification, technology innovation, natural resource management, and low pesticides on smart-green agriculture production have yet to be identified. Insights from this study can help governments, policy-makers, and farmers in emerging economies by adapting their strategies within their local contexts.

This paper aims to investigate the multifaced aspects and consequences of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) from an Australia-China Relationship perspective.

This paper leverages the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis to examine both the internal and external factors that affect Australia and China in the context of the CBAM. In addition, we employ the PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) framework to identify effective strategies for Australia-China cooperation following the implementation of the CBAM.

Our analysis reveals numerous mutual interests and opportunities for bilateral collaboration, despite challenges and threats, positioning the CBAM as a potentially significant catalyst for joint initiatives.

This paper proposes 10 potential areas for Australia and China cooperation from the political economic social and technological PEST dimensions.

This paper makes a pioneering attempt to explore potential strategies, both individually, and together, that Australia and China can adopt to manage the impact and consequence of CBAM.

This article summarizes the international scientific research output of global forest product models, infers future research trends and provides reference for quantitative analysis and mathematical modeling of Chinese forest product problems, with the aim of contributing to promoting domestic production of Chinese forest products and strengthening international trade competitiveness of forest products.

In 1999, Joseph Buongiorno, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin in the United States of America, proposed the global forest products model (GFPM), which was first applied to research in the global forestry sector. GFPM is a recursive dynamic model based on five assumptions: macroeconomics, local equilibrium, dynamic equilibrium, forest product conversion flow and trade inertia. Using a certain year from 1992 to present as the base period, it simulates and predicts changes in prices, production and import and export trade indicators of 14 forest products in 180 countries (regions) through computer programs. Its advantages lie in covering a wide range of countries and a wide variety of forest products. The data mainly include forest resource data, forest product trade data, and other economic data required by the model, sourced from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the World Bank, respectively.

Compared to international quantitative and modeling research in the field of forest product production and trade, China's related research is not comprehensive and in-depth, and there is not much quantitative and mathematical modeling research, resulting in a significant gap. This article summarizes the international scientific research output of global forest product models, infers future research trends, and provides reference for quantitative analysis and mathematical modeling of Chinese forest product problems, with the aim of contributing to promoting domestic production of Chinese forest products and strengthening international trade competitiveness of forest products.

On the basis of summarizing and analyzing the international scientific research output of GFPM, sorting out the current research status and progress at home and abroad, this article discusses potential research expansion directions in 10 aspects, including the types, yield and quality of domestic forest product production, international trade of forest products, and external impacts on the forestry system, in order to provide new ideas for global forest product model research in China.

This study deals with changes in European Union's (EU's) trade potential in Machinery (HS 84–85) and Transportation (HS86-89) products.

The study uses a Structural Gravity model, Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimation together with panel data for the years 2002–2018 and a two-step procedure that employs predicted values of bilateral trade to compare potential to actual trade.

Results for Machinery products suggest a potential to expand trade with existing Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in the American continent, and countries of the IGAD region in Africa. In Transportation, a high trade potential with RTAs is found in the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. Policy suggestions concentrate on opportunities for enhancing trade relations through trade liberalization and agreement proliferation.

There are no studies to date, that examine “collective” measure of EU trade potential, that treats the EU as a single country. Changes in existing opportunities to expand trade, common for EU members, are of special interest for policy formulation, especially after the recent turmoil presented by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Greek Economic Crisis (GEC). Treating the EU as a single entity, is necessary for the formulation of an effective, common, EU trade policy. This study concentrates on the manufacturing sector to examine existing opportunities for the EU to expand trade, after the GFC and the GEC. This article deals with Machinery (HS 84 and 85) and Transportation (HS 86 through 89) products as they comprise a significant part of total EU exports, reaching 41% of total exports in 2016. Finally, this study offers a unique illustration of results through trade potential heat maps.

A key challenge for exporters and international marketing/purchasing managers is formulating strategic responses to deal with geopolitical disruptions during a trade war between superpowers. While past studies provide insightful analysis of the influence of changes in the institutional environment (regulatory pressures) on national and firm-level trade activities, they tend to ignore the association between inward (sourcing) or outward (export) international activities of firms during a trade war. In this study, we aim to explore various strategic options employed by third-party SME exporters in response to geopolitical disruptions, institutional pressures and constraints during a trade war.

We adopted a qualitative methodology and applied a hermeneutical approach in collecting, analysing and theorising interview findings. We conducted interviews with 15 owners or senior managers from 12 Australian and New Zealand exporters that exported or sourced significantly from at least one party of the trade war, the USA or China, between 2018 and 2020.

Our study developed a typology of fencing vs. balancing for explaining third-party SME exporters’ response strategies in terms of export market and international sourcing locations during a trade war. Fencing strategy centres on location choice decisions based on a fence or a secure buffer zone. Balancing strategy focuses on leveraging opportunities outside the conflict zone, i.e. third-party countries. Our study finds that exporters’ location choice decisions are influenced by a number of institutional factors during the trade war.

Firstly, our study examined only the early phase of the trade war under the “Trump” era. Future research may consider a longitudinal study design that examines exporters’ responses to global political uncertainty over a longer term. Secondly, we chose Australia and New Zealand as the focal context of this study. Future research could investigate exporters from other third-party countries that have different institutional conditions during the US-China trade war.

Firstly, an exporting firm should monitor and assess closely the wider changes in international relations between their home country’s major security partner and major trading partner, and the impact of these changes on the political risks of operating in international locations. Secondly, as the trade war intensifies, the fencing option needs to be given a greater weight than the balancing option in the strategic decision making of an exporter from a third-party country. Lastly, we encourage marketers and managers to reflect on and differentiate short-term and long-term benefits in strategic market-sourcing location decisions.

Our study makes a pioneering effort to theorise the linkages between institutional factors and the combined evaluation of export market selection and sourcing location selection choices under global political uncertainty based on the institution-based view. We present a conceptual framework highlighting the importance of institutional avoidance, embeddedness, comparative institutional advantages and multiple institutional logics for SME exporters’ international location selections during the trade war. Furthermore, we combine these institutional factors into two overarching constructs namely institutional buffer and institutional pluralism.

In international business (IB), the discussion of COVID-19-related global value chain (GVC) models driving resilience has taken momentum since May 2020. The purpose of this study is to uncover insights that the pandemic provided as a unique research opportunity, holistically, revealing the significant role of non-lead firms in GVC outcomes and resilience. This allows to extend theory as the authors critically identify impact criteria and assess interdependence and valence, thus progressing the traditional (pre-pandemic) IB view of GVC governance and orchestration.

This study opts for an integrative review to help create a much-needed extension of IB theory by means of a critical perspective on GVC theory. The authors examine the extant body of IB literature as the relevant stock of collective IB knowledge prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, uncovering contributions – with a focus on the role of non-lead firms in orchestration and resilience – that allows to clarify what was not evident pre-pandemic. With this, the authors move the theory from its efficiency focus to a better recognition of the interdependencies of power and profit outcomes stemming from asymmetries of interrelationships. By design, the authors focus on the unique research period of the pandemic and orchestration complexities along the development of configurational arguments beyond simple correlations (Fiss, 2011), revealing key dependencies as key themes. The authors highlight further research avenues following Snyder (2019) that are called upon to strengthen that understanding and that helps extend theory.

This research provides a critical perspective on the application of the traditional IB views for GVC governance (designed for efficiency, cost and proximity to markets with pre-dominance for just in time), which has shifted during the pandemic to accommodate for adaptation and adjustment to resilience and just in case considerations. The holistic review reveals not only the key country- and multinational enterprise (MNE)-dependencies with residual impact determining the balance between just-in-time and just-in-case. Also, the authors advance the understanding of the (un)balance of the traditional GVC – focused on just-in-case rather than just-in-time through a lead and non-lead GVC participation and power lens yet rarely observed. The authors find that governance should not be construed as “management” such that it resolves into decisions undertaken in lead firms for execution in subordinate GVC participants. Autonomy allows to subsidiary units by MNE lead firms and/or exercised by (mainly, innovative) non-subsidiary GVC participant firms, is uncovered as a key driver in this. Greater delegation capacity appears to help provide resilience to loss in profit, with a recognition that there may be a dynamic trade-off between power and profit. In addition, the authors are able to identify correlations with innovation, demand elasticity, digital uptake, investment and other, that the authors trust will set the scene for additional research deepening and extending the findings.

Integrative literature reviews include a problem formulation (i.e. that is limited to published topics around an emerging theme) and are hence very focused in nature and approach. This applies to this paper. Data analysis in this method is not typically using statistical methods in contrast to meta-analyses. Also, the authors limit the sample to a relatively short time period with 33 publications analysed, purposefully focusing on the most prompt and “acute” insights into GVCs during the pandemic.

The traditional GVC governance model is designed for efficiency, cost and proximity to markets with pre-dominance for just in time. The authors reveal dependencies that are instrumental to better understand lead and non-lead interaction and relative autonomy, with a focus on residual impact determining the balance between just-in-time and just-in-case that, if in the sought equilibrium and agile, can allow alignment with context and this resilience. This paper specifically provides practical insights and visualization that highlights stages/“ripple” effects and their impact and the questions to ask as stakeholders look for GVC resilience. This includes, int.al., firms and their role as strategic agents, prompting participants through the learnings from exogenous shock to realign their strategies, redistributed manufacturing of production across subsidiary and non-subsidiary non-lead firms, greater competition and hence power for suppliers leveraging resilience and innovation, greater understanding of localization and regionalization of production of essential supplies, interaction with governments, and of investment impacts abroad especially to secure GVC participation.

The insights provided through this extension of theory with its literature review reveal the importance of aligning IB research into GVCs to factors that became visible through alternative or unusual settings, as they have the power to reveal the limitations of traditional views. In this case, a mainly efficiency-led, just-in-time focused GVC governance model is reviewed through the literature that emanated during the pandemic, with a critical perspective, which helped uncover and underline the complexities and evolution of GVC governance, providing fundamental support to solutioning the continuing global supply chain challenges that started as a result of the pandemic and are yet again accelerated by the Ukraine and Middle Eastern wars and its impact with, int.al., concerns over possible severe global food, labour/migration and resources crises. IB holds a social responsibility to help identify critical challenges from the disciplinary perspective and help advance resilience for social benefit.

This paper supports the original IB theory development by extending GVC theory into the lead – non-lead dynamics that may, under certain conditions, provide a “Resilience wall” for GVCs. The value created through insights stemming from a unique period of time for GVC is significant. It allows us thus also to pave the way to an emerging and critical research adaption looking into equilibrium, nuancing demand elasticity, better understanding trade and investment impacts along GVCs and more. By examining views on the sources of pandemic risks in a possibly unique setting, the authors offer added value from extant IB research insights by combining them, revealing the importance for GVCs to investigate not only key dependencies between the exogenous shock, i.e. context, and the impacts assessed through this literature but to further use their inherent value to create a framework for further conceptualization and extension of the traditional IB view on GVC governance. This work illustrates the urgency and importance for IB to take a timely and possibly more critical approach to the investigation of governance models that have, to date, shown some significant limitations.

The purpose of this research is to systematically scrutinize the influence of macroeconomic determinants on trade openness, through the lens of various trade theories, with a particular focus on the economies of the GIPSI countries – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

This study investigates the macroeconomic factors influencing trade openness in the GIPSI economies from 1995 to 2020. Methods include stepwise regression (SR) for model selection, Pedroni panel cointegration test and panel regression results. The analysis uses advanced panel regressions, including FMOLS, Panel OLS and FEM. The long-term dynamics were tested using Pedroni cointegration, while Granger causality testing was used to examine the causal direction between the trade openness ratio and trade determinant.

The results show both long-term and short-term relationships between trade openness and (1) foreign direct investment, (2) labor force participation rate, (3) trade reserves and (4) trade balance. The researchers also detected unidirectional and bidirectional causality relationships between trade openness and these four factors. The study also revealed that trade reserves (TR) emerge as the most influential determinant of trade openness, and per capita income does not exhibit economic significance concerning the trade openness of GIPSI economies.

This research is conducted within the context of the GIPSI nations (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy). As such, the outcomes may not be universally applicable to other economic systems due to the distinct institutional settings and governance structures across different economic groups. Future investigations may explore the relationship between trade openness and its determinants by incorporating different variables.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study investigating the theory that suggested trade drivers drive the trade openness of GIPSI countries context. By focusing on GIPSI countries, the study offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of trade openness in economies that have experienced financial crises and stringent austerity measures.

Considering the evolving importance of green finance, this study uses climate-related development mitigation finance as a proxy of green finance and investigates the impact of green finance on ecological footprint as an indicator of environmental quality along with the influence of economic growth, renewable energy, greenhouse gas emissions, trade openness and urbanization across 47 developing countries over the period 2000–2018.

After finding the presence of cross-sectional dependency among variables, the second-generation panel unit root test was employed to detect the order of integration among the variables. Since all the variables were found to be stationary, Westerlund cointegration technique was employed to detect the long-run relationship among the variables. Then, the long-run elasticity among the dependent and independent variables was tested using fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS), dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and pooled mean group–autoregressive distributed lag (PMG–ARDL) approaches.

The empirical findings suggest the presence of long-run relationship among all the variables, namely, ecological footprint, green finance, economic growth, renewable energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, trade openness and urbanization for the selected developing countries in the sample. Furthermore, economic growth, greenhouse gas emissions, trade openness and urbanization, all have a positive and significant impact on the ecological footprint, whereas renewable energy consumption and green finance have a significant and negative impact on the ecological footprint, which supports the view that environmental quality is improved with the greater use of renewable energy technologies and allocation of greater amounts of more green finance.

The empirical results of this study offer policymakers and regulators some implications for environmental policy for protecting the countries from ecological issues.

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.

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.

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.

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.