Digital Infrastructure and Export Quality: A Country-Product-Level Analysis

This article investigates how digital infrastructure affects export quality. Using countries’ bilateral trade data disaggregated at the product level, we find that improvements in digital infrastructure significantly raise a country’s export quality. The result is robust to alternative fixed-effects specifications and to excluding the COVID-19 period. We identify two main mechanisms. First, digital infrastructure improves supply chain efficiency by reducing coordination frictions and strengthening logistics performance. Second, it supports innovation by facilitating knowledge diffusion and enhancing firms’ technological capabilities. Heterogeneity analyses further show that the quality gains are larger for high-tech products, World Trade Organization (WTO) members, long-distance trade pairs, and exporters with diversified product and market portfolios. These findings suggest that digital infrastructure is an important driver of export upgrading.