In today's era of deep integration of globalisation and digitisation, the digital economy is reshaping the world's economic landscape at an unprecedented speed, and with the development of the digital economy, its impact on import and export trade is gradually unfolding. In this context, this study comprehensively explores the linear effect, non-linear effect and sub-geographical characteristics of the digital economy driving the development of China's import and export trade based on China's inter-provincial panel data from 2012-2021, which shows that: the digital economy can significantly promote the development of China's import and export trade, but in the eastern region, the promotion effect of the digital economy is not obvious; the digital economy on the development of China's import and export trade has a Non-linear dynamic impact, the impact is specifically manifested as positive marginal efficiency increment, and there is obvious spatial heterogeneity, that is, there are differences in the impact effect on different regions; further research found that the non-linear impact of the digital economy on the development of import and export trade will be subject to the constraints of its own development history and the regional gross domestic product per capita.
Wen-yi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.