Digital Economy Development and Export Trade Complexity: The Mediating Effect of Technological Innovation

Abstract

Against the backdrop of increasingly complex global economic conditions, intensifying trade frictions, and rising trade barriers, this paper uses panel data from 30 provinces and municipalities in China over an 11-year period to construct a digital economy indicator system and empirically examine the relationship among the digital economy, technological innovation, and export trade complexity. The results indicate that the development of the digital economy can significantly enhance the technological complexity of exports, thereby improving a country’s position in international trade. These findings remain robust after a series of robustness tests, including replacing explanatory variables and introducing lagged digital economy development indicators. Mechanism analysis shows that the development of the digital economy significantly promotes the level of innovation, which in turn increases the technological complexity of export products through innovation. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive effect of the digital economy on export technological complexity is more pronounced in eastern regions, while the transformation efficiency of innovation outcomes in central regions remains relatively limited and the digital economy infrastructure in western regions is still underdeveloped. Further analysis employs a machine learning random forest model to examine the nonlinear relationship between the digital economy and export technological complexity. The results are analyzed and interpreted using optimal feature selection, relative feature importance ranking, partial dependence plots, and decision tree models.