Does digital finance facilitate improvement in export product quality? Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Inefficiency and resource misallocation in the financial system, coupled with a shortage of traditional financial services, have hindered export product quality improvement in China. Against this backdrop, there is an evident need to examine the dynamics between digital finance and export product quality. Hence, this study focuses on the impact of digital finance on export product quality upgrades in China. The examination draws on panel data of 39,387 firm-level samples from 2011 to 2014. Empirical results show that digital finance helps upgrade export product quality by enhancing enterprises’ financial stability. Moreover, the positive effect of the depth of digital finance usage is more pronounced than that of the breadth of digital finance coverage. Our findings imply that China must continue deepening the digital financial market and expand and improve the scope and efficiency of financial services.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital finance
• export product quality
• depth-breadth of financial services
• financial stability

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F14
• G20
• L15

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Note: data source: https://en.idf.pku.edu.cn/achievements/seriesofdigitafinanceindexes/index.htm.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project [22NDJC015Z]; Hangzhou Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project [M22JC091]; Zhejiang Provincial Soft Science Research Planning Project [2022C35080,2022C35088].