The literature of measuring the effects of CBEC on the regional economic growth and spillover effects ignores the empowering nature of the artificial intelligence technology and is not systematic in examining the mechanism of regional economic interaction when CBEC is coupled with AI. In this direction, this article presents a combination analysis approach based on the artificial intelligence technology and the CBEC data. It measures the direct influence of CBEC development and AI technology applications on the economic growth of the different regions and the spatial spillover influence in the neighboring regions by developing spatial econometric model (SAR/SEM) and AI application indicators. As far as the methodology is concerned, this paper builds the main explanatory variables based on those indicators like a volume of enterprise cross-border transactions, logistics automation index, and the level of AI application. Meanwhile, it integrates variables that are under control like infrastructure, population size and openness to generate economic growth indicators and spatially weighted impacts across different regions. The experimental results show that for every 100 million yuan increase in CBEC transaction volume, the local GDP growth rate increases by about 0.042 percentage points, and the spillover effect of GDP growth rate in neighboring regions is about 0.018 percentage points; For every 0.1 increase in the AI application index, the local GDP growth rate increases by about 0.0035 percentage points, and the spillover effect from neighboring regions is about 0.0022 percentage points, with a significant overall effect. Further analysis reveals that the CBEC transaction volume in regions A and B in the east is 82 billion yuan and 76 billion yuan respectively, with AI application indices of 0.78 and 0.74, respectively. Its economic driving effect on neighboring regions is significantly higher than that of the central and western regions.
Hong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.