The Digital Economy and the Quality of Imported Agricultural Products

Abstract

China’s import trade is shifting from scale expansion towards quality upgrading. The quality of imported agricultural products matters not only for consumer welfare, but also for the optimisation of China’s import structure under a higher level of opening-up. Using Chinese customs import data for 2009-2019 and a provincial digital economy development index, this paper measures the quality of imported agricultural products at the province-origin-HS8 product-year level and examines how the digital economy is associated with import quality through a quality-signal identification mechanism. The results show, first, that digital economy development is associated with higher import quality. The baseline coefficient is 0.080; a one-standard-deviation increase in the level of digital economy development corresponds to about a 0.024-standard-deviation increase in the quality of imported agricultural products. This result remains robust after robustness checks and endogeneity tests. Second, in provinces with a higher level of digital economy development, high-quality origins display clearer price differences and quality advantages, and the dispersion of residualised prices is also higher. These patterns indicate a clearer quality premium and price stratification in the import market. Third, origin-relationship screening results show that low-quality origin relationships are more likely not to continue in the following year. Heterogeneity by Rauch product classification further shows that the positive relationship is more stable for organised-exchange goods and reference-priced goods. The paper argues that China should improve digital quality-information infrastructure for imported agricultural products, strengthen importers’ capacity to identify high-quality origins, and use digital regulatory tools to improve the screening of low-quality origins.