The Impact of E-commerce on the Upgrading of County-level Industrial Structure—From the Perspective of Export and Enterprise Expansion

Abstract

This paper takes the "Comprehensive Demonstration Counties for E-commerce in Rural Areas" project as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically analyzes the impact and action mechanism of e-commerce on the transformation and upgrading of the county-level industrial structure through a multi-period DID model. The results show that during the pilot period of the project, e-commerce has significantly promoted the upgrading of the county-level industrial structure. This effect is more pronounced in county-level regions in the western part of China and is influenced by local network resources and agricultural development. Further mechanism analysis shows that e-commerce mainly affects the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure through channels such as expanding product exports and stimulating entrepreneurial vitality.