New driving force for China’s import growth: Assessing the role of cross‐border e‐commerce

Shuzhong Ma, Xueyao Guo and Hongsheng Zhang

The World Economy, 2021, vol. 44, issue 12, 3674-3706

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of cross‐border e‐commerce on China's import growth, using the promulgation of cross‐border e‐commerce‐related policies since 2012 as a quasi‐natural experiment and using the ‘Cross‐border E‐commerce Retail Import Commodity List’ to identify cross‐border e‐commerce industries. Our difference‐in‐difference results show that cross‐border e‐commerce has significantly boosted China's import growth. Dynamic effects show that while China's imports were low prior to 2012, cross‐border e‐commerce has increased China's imports significantly since 2012, verifying the validity of our baseline results. Placebo tests and a series of robustness checks further confirm the validity and robustness of the baseline results. Further analysis reveals that cross‐border e‐commerce has mainly promoted imports from developed countries, and primarily facilitated imports of clothing, food and daily necessities. Mechanism analysis shows that cross‐border e‐commerce not only stimulated both the intensive and extensive margins in import growth, but also reduced cultural distances and increased China's imports from countries with larger cultural distances substantially. However, geographical and institutional distances still matter and exhibit significantly negative effects on China's cross‐border e‐commerce imports.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13168

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:worlde:v:44:y:2021:i:12:p:3674-3706

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0378-5920

Access Statistics for this article

The World Economy is currently edited by David Greenaway

More articles in The World Economy from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().