Abstract：With the continuous rise of China’s labor costs and the integration of other developing countries into the lower tiers of the global production network, China’s traditional comparative advantages in international trade are gradually diminishing. The rapid development of emerging technologies, represented by information technology and artificial intelligence, has deeply integrated with domestic economic and social development. Digital empowerment has ignited a new wave of industrial transformation, accelerating the pace of digitalization across various sectors and providing an opportunity to cultivate competitive advantages in foreign trade. Given the prevalence of multi-product export enterprises in China and the significant proportion of core product trade volume, an important issue to consider is how the digital transformation will affect the quality of export products of Chinese multi-product exporters.The existing research on the impact of digital transformation on the quality of export products has certain limitations. Specifically, the literature focuses on the aggregate enterprise level, but does not involve the research at the product level. However, research based on the assumption of single-product enterprises cannot accurately describe the multi-product export phenomenon common in Chinese export enterprises, nor can it deeply reveal the resource allocation and performance adjustment behavior within multi-product exporters. In this context, from the perspective of export product quality of multi-product enterprises, this paper explores the reliable pathways for the enterprise digital transformation to enhance the export competitive advantage of Chinese multi-product enterprises.This paper conducts an empirical study by using the matched data from China Customs database and CSMAR database for the period 2006 to 2015. The results indicate that digital transformation can significantly facilitate the upgrading of the overall export products quality of multi-product exporters, but the promotion effect varies across products of different rankings. To be specific, the closer a product is to the core competitiveness, the stronger the effect of digital transformation is on the quality improvement. Mechanism test results demonstrate that, on the one hand, the digital transformation can optimize resource allocation within multi-product enterprises, driving the concentration of resources towards relatively core products and promoting the improvement of product quality across different rankings. On the other hand, the digital transformation helps to reduce the marginal cost of products of multi-product enterprises and improve production efficiency, thereby promoting the upgrading of export product quality, and having a particularly positive impact on the quality improvement of core products.The marginal contribution of this paper can be summarized as follows first, this paper is the first to explores the impact of digital transformation on the quality of export products from the perspective of multi-product export enterprises. It captures the uneven impact of digital transformation on the export quality of core and non-core products in the multi-product export enterprises, thereby expanding the research scope of the digital economy and product quality;second, this paper enriches the research on internal resource adjustment of micro-enterprises by detailing internal adjustment between different products, revealing the impact of digital transformation on internal resource allocation of multi-product export enterprises, and adding a new dimension to studies on international trade and industrial organization; third, from the perspective of the marginal cost, this paper analyzes the differentiated impact of digital transformation on the production efficiency of different ranked products within an enterprise. It highlights that the increase in marginal cost is a significant factor limiting the expansion of product lines in multi-product enterprises, providing a new approach to investigate the adjustment of product performance within the enterprise.
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