Cross-Border E-Commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones and Urban Export Product Quality: Evidence from China

Abstract

This study examines whether and through what channels China's cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) comprehensive pilot zones (CPZs) raise the quality, rather than merely the volume, of city-level exports. Treating the staggered approval of CPZs since 2015 as a quasi-natural experiment, we build a panel of 282 prefecture-level cities over 2011-2023 and estimate a multi-period difference-in-differences model. Export product quality is recovered by the demand-residual approach using HS six-digit customs data. Results show that CPZ approval raises city-level export product quality by approximately 6.8% on average (p < 0.01), and the effect stabilizes by the third year after approval. Mechanism analysis indicates that the quality gain operates mainly through lower information and matching costs on digital platforms (about 42% of the total effect), followed by digital infrastructure accumulation (31%) and local innovation output (22%). Oaxaca-style decomposition reveals that about 81% of the effect is a within-product quality upgrade rather than a compositional shift toward higher-unit-value goods. The findings suggest that CPZs function as institutional enablers of high-quality trade, and that expanding pilot zones to inland cities should be paired with digital infrastructure, logistics and talent support.