Policy Analysis and Development Evaluation of Digital Trade: An International Comparison

• Date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/cwe.12280
• Author: Jiwen Guo,Shuzhong Ma,Hongsheng Zhang
• Published date: 01 May 2019

China & World Economy / 49–75, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2019

49

©2019 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

*Shuzhong Ma, Professor, School of Economics, Zhejiang University, China. Email: mashuzhong@zju.edu.

cn; Jiwen Guo, PhD Candidate, School of Economics, Zhejiang University, China. Email: guojiwen@zju.

edu.cn; Hongsheng Zhang (corresponding author), Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Economics, Zhejiang

University, China. Email: hzhang30@163.com. Shuzhong Ma acknowledges nancial support for this study

from the Key Grant Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research of the Ministry of Education of China

(No. 16JZD021) titled “Research on Forecast and Mitigation Mechanisms for Operational Risks of Cross-

border E-commerce Enterprises.” Hongsheng Zhang’s work was funded by the National Natural Science

Foundation of China (No. 71803173) entitled “Research on the Promotion of Cross-border E-commerce on the

Enhancement of Global Value Chain Status,” the Project of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of

Education of China (No. 18YJC790215) entitled “Research on the Evolution of Trade Cost Based on Cross-

border E-commerce” and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2017M620237 and 2018T110579).

Policy Analysis and Development Evaluation of

Digital Trade: An International Comparison

Shuzhong Ma, Jiwen Guo, Hongsheng Zhang*

Abstract

As an extension of traditional trade, digital trade is a new type of trade in the era of the

digital economy. In this paper, we rst analyze the digital trade-related strategies of eight

leading economies through word clouds and dissect China’s digital trade-related policies

using the word frequency method by sorting through the digital trade-related policy

documents of 26 economies and Chinese provinces. We then evaluate the status quo of

digital trade development in 111 countries and Chinese provinces by building a digital trade

index system to determine the development environment and market potential. The results

show that all countries attach great importance to digital technology, data and government

guidance in the development of digital trade. The results also reveal that “development,”

“service” and “construction” are the three most frequently used words in various Chinese

documents. The overall level of China’s digital trade is at the global vanguard, but is

characterized by uneven regional development. In the era of digital trade, traditional

international trade theory is also in urgent need of breakthroughs and innovation.

Key words: cross-border e-commerce, development evaluation, digital trade, intelligent

manufacturing, international trade theories

JEL codes: F17, F23, F44

I. Introduction

In a well-known book, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked

Shuzhong Ma et al. / 49–75, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2019

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©2019 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Intelligence, Don Tapscott, the top-ranked digital thinker according to Thinkers50,

proposes 12 characteristics of the new economy: knowledge, digitization, virtualization,

molecularization, integration or internet working, disintermediation, convergence, innovation,

immediacy, globalization and discordance. These features of the digital economy and the

digital technologies that underlie its development, such as big data and cloud computing,

are transforming business and international trade and have greatly contributed to the arrival

and development of digital trade, highly improving transaction efciency and signicantly

reducing trade costs. Traditional trade, characterized by its large scale and high value, is

basically conducted offline from inquiry, bargaining and contracting to final delivery. In

contrast, digital trade, particularly cross-border e-commerce, a fragmented trading mode with

multibatch features, has subverted the previous trade model; it is reshaping the entire trading

system and will have a new and signicant impact on countries’ economic development.

As a key link of the digital economy, digital trade, such as e-commerce, has already

shown vigorous prospects and booming development. According to the Ministry of

Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (MOFCOM), global online retail sales reached

US$2.304tn in 2017, with a growth rate of 24.8 percent compared to 2016, accounting for

10.2 percent of total global retail sales (MOFCOM, 2018a). The global B2B e-commerce

transaction volume in 2017 reached US$7.7tn, more than double the transaction volume of

online retail sales (Amasty, 2018). China’s digital trade has also demonstrated a rapid growth

trend. The overall e-commerce transaction volume increased from RMB6.09tn in 2011 to

RMB29.16tn in 2017, with an average annual growth rate of 29.8 percent (MOFCOM,

2018a), in contrast to the annual average of less than 5 percent for traditional trade during

the same period. In particular, cross-border e-commerce in China has vigorously developed.

The transaction volume increased from RMB2.9tn in 2013 to RMB7.6tn in 2017, with an

average annual growth rate of 27.2 percent, and the proportion of cross-border e-commerce

in total imports and exports rose from 11.2 percent to 27.3 percent (iiMedia Research, 2018).

Digital trade, characterized by virtualization, platformization and personalization, has had

a profound impact on trade patterns and promoted the intelligent transformation of the

manufacturing industry and other related industries. To seize the valuable opportunities of

digitalization and to plan the development of the digital economy, Australia, the EU, France

and many other countries have issued digital strategies, one of the focuses of which is how to

achieve digital upgrading for traditional trade.

The rst step in evaluating the development of digital trade is to clarify the conceptual

connotation of digital trade, for example: What is digital trade? What trading objects

should be included in digital trade? and How does cross-border e-commerce relate to

digital trade? Because of the short development time and the diverse development modes,

there is presently no consensus on a denition of digital trade. Weber (2010) proposed that