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| Digital Government Construction and Enterprise Total Factor Productivity: A Quasi-natural Experiment Based on the Information Benefiting People Pilot Policy |
| YANG Qing, JI Yun
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School of Economics, Fudan University;
School of Business, East China University of Political Science and Law |
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Abstract In the digital economy, data has emerged as a critical factor of production, fundamentally reshaping societal transaction costs and resource allocation efficiency, thereby significantly enhancing social productivity. The Chinese government has actively promoted the construction of the digital government, undertaking comprehensive digital transformation to reconfigure government service models, elevate service efficacy, and provide support for high-quality economic development.
The Information Benefiting People (IBP) pilot policy, implemented in 2014, represents China's earliest national-level digital government initiative. This policy adopted an “Expert guidance+fiscal subsidies+ex-post assessment” mechanism. It precisely identified the transformative requirements of the public service system, aiming to “benefit enterprises and convenience the public” by dismantling administrative barriers, facilitating cross-level and cross-department information sharing, and integrating dispersed public service resources. Pilot cities subsequently constructed digital government platforms based on these directives, substantially streamlining administrative procedures, strengthening government-enterprise communication, and enhancing the efficiency of societal operations, thereby effectively stimulating economic and social vitality.
This study employs a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology to investigate the impact of the IBP pilot policy on firms' total factor productivity (TFP), using a sample of A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2021. TFP is estimated using both the Levinsohn-Petrin (LP) and Olley-Pakes (OP) methods. The regression results indicate that the policy significantly augmented the TFP levels of enterprises in pilot regions.
The IBP pilot policy influenced corporate TFP through three primary channels. First, by promoting extensive information sharing and circulation, the IBP policy mitigated information asymmetry between banks and enterprises. This enhancement improved banks' capacity for credit demand assessment and risk management, thereby alleviating corporate financing constraints. Second, the IBP policy plays a heterogeneous role in reducing firms' non-productive costs. Following the policy's implementation, the fairness and transparency of administrative processes improved, and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures were substantially streamlined. Third, the IBP policy also diminished firms' perception of economic policy uncertainty. By lowering enterprises' information search costs, the policy enabled firms to more acutely perceive changes in the external policy environment.
Furthermore, the study reveals that the impact of the IBP pilot policy on corporate TFP exhibits significant heterogeneity. Specifically, the TFP-enhancing effect of the IBP pilot policy was more pronounced for enterprises with weak bank-enterprise relationships and for those located in cities characterized by higher levels of informatization,and traditional government-business relations.
The marginal contributions of this paper are threefold. First, by focusing on the “Information Benefiting People” pilot policy, this study empirically substantiates the TFP-enhancing effect of government information sharing and cross-departmental business collaboration, providing critical empirical support for consensus on the economic value of digital government. Second, transcending conventional research frameworks centered on institutional environments and enterprise characteristics, this paper systematically demonstrates how digital government construction, as a core element of modern governance, drives corporate TFP growth through optimized public services, thereby offering a novel perspective in productivity research. Lastly, this study innovatively disentangles the underlying mechanisms, confirming its TFP-enhancing effects through three pathways: alleviating financing constraints, reducing non-productive costs, and weakening the perception of economic policy uncertainty. It further identifies heterogeneous effects based on the strength of bank-enterprise relationships and government-business interaction modes, providing theoretical underpinnings for understanding how digital government optimizes resource allocation and stimulates market innovation, consequently deepening the comprehension of pathways to high-quality economic development.
The conclusions of this study not only enrich the theoretical understanding of digital government from the perspective of the IBP pilot policy but also bear significant practical implications. Governments should persistently augment their efforts in digital transformation, accelerating the promotion and implementation of digital government projects, such as the IBP, to comprehensively elevate the efficiency and quality of government services. This, in turn, will effectively reduce corporate operational costs, fostering a more conducive operating environment for enterprises.
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Received: 15 February 2023
Published: 02 July 2025
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