Abstract Under the background of information development and export quality improvement, whether the construction of “smart city”can be a driving force for the high-quality development of export trade is worth further discussion. This paper discusses the impact of“smart city”construction on Export Trade Quality of Enterprises. We adopt the multiphase difference-in-differences design to systematically analyze the influence taken by the construction of “smart city” on export product quality of Chinese enterprises and its affection mechanism, which is based on China Customs Data, China Industrial Enterprise Data and prefecture-level city data from 2010 to 2015. It is found in the researching that the construction of “smart city” obviously improves the export product quality of Chinese enterprises. And this conclusion still works even under inspections like conducting propensity score matching,performing instrumental variable regression,removing other interference policies and so on. The further analysis has shown that the upgrades of product quality can be promoted through the improvement of domestic intermediate input sharing, imported intermediate goods types and technical innovation, which is promoted by the construction of “smart city”. The results of quality improvement in exports haveheterogeneity between cities, enterprises and industries, which has a more prominent impact on cities in the eastern region, low administrative level cities,private enterprises, enterprises with high domestic value-added rate, industries with intensive technology and industries with high digitization level. This paper has great implications for the use of urban information construction to cultivate new advantages of export trade.
2023, Vol. 40 
