| XIE Rui,ZHANG Jiahuan,WANG Haicheng.Electricity Infrastructure and Enterprise Export Scale:Evidence from the Three Gorges Project[J].The Journal of quantitative and technical economics,2025,(12):194-212 |
| 电力基础设施与企业出口规模——基于三峡工程送电的准自然实验 |
| Electricity Infrastructure and Enterprise Export Scale:Evidence from the Three Gorges Project |
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| DOI： |
| 中文关键词: 电力基础设施 企业出口规模 三峡工程 |
| 英文关键词: Electricity Infrastructure Enterprise Export Scale Three Gorges Project |
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| 中文摘要: |
| 成功的经济转型战略通常需要强大的基础设施作为支撑，以保障和促进国内外经济关系的有效联动。本文基于 2001~2021 年中国 A 股制造业上市公司数据，以三峡工程 2003 年起的跨区域电力外送为准自然实验，采用多期双重差分法识别电力基础设施对企业出口的影响。研究发现，电力基础设施建设显著促进了企业出口，而且降低企业成本和延长贸易关系持续时间是其主要影响渠道，并且上述促进效应对大企业、内资企业和流程制造型企业更为显著。电力基础设施不仅推动出口“量的显著增长”，也促进出口“质的有效提升”，显著提高了企业一般贸易出口占比、高技术产品出口占比和出口产品质量。本文为理解电力基础设施在稳定外贸基本盘、培育出口竞争新优势中的重要作用提供了微观证据，为制定更为合理的电力保障政策提供了重要启示。 |
| 英文摘要: |
| A successful economic transformation strategy typically requires robust infrastructure as a foundation to ensure and facilitate effective linkages in both domestic and international economic relations. Electricity infrastructure is fundamental to modern industrial production, as its reliability directly determines firms’ production efficiency, product quality, and capacity to fulfill contractual obligations. Intuitively, electricity infrastructure ensures the continuity of production and enhances mutual confidence between trading partners, thereby creating favorable conditions for export activities. In practice, China has witnessed extraordinary expansion in its electricity infrastructure since 2000, concurrent with a period of remarkable export growth. However, research on how the electricity infrastructure affects enterprise exports is relatively scarce.The Three Gorges Project is an excellent case study for analyzing the impact of electricity infrastructure. First, as the largest hydropower station in the world, it creates significant power generation benefits with a total installed capacity ranking first globally. Second, the project features a vast transmission scope covering nine provinces and two municipality-level cities. Lastly, the power generated by the Three Gorges project has been consistently sent out, offering notable temporal changes. From 2003 to 2012, a total of 32 hydropower generating units with a capacity of 700,000 kilowatts were successively put into operation. Therefore, we can use the variation in power transmission provided by the Three Gorges hydroelectric project across time and provinces to identify changes in electricity infrastructure.Based on the data of China’s A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2001 to 2021, we take the Three Gorges Project as a natural experiment and conduct a causal identification using a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) method. We find that, on average, electricity infrastructure increases the export volume of enterprises by about 13.77%. A further detailed examination of the mechanism suggests that electricity infrastructure improves enterprise export by reducing costs and extending the duration of export activities. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that electricity infrastructure mainly promotes the export of large, domestic, and process manufacturing enterprises. Additionally, we find that electricity infrastructure facilitates the transformation and upgrading of enterprises’ exports.The contributions of this study are as follows. First, it broadens the research perspective on the economic effects of power infrastructure. Most existing studies have examined these effects from a macroeconomic perspective, while the few that utilize micro-level data tend to overlook the potential impacts of power infrastructure on firms within an open economy context. This study is among the first to leverage micro-level firm data to provide new evidence on the export effects of power infrastructure from an open economy perspective, thereby enriching the literature on the economic impacts of power infrastructure. Second, it elucidates the channels through which power infrastructure influences firm exports. Although theoretical and empirical studies have acknowledged the critical role of power infrastructure in a country’s participation in international trade, the precise mechanisms through which power infrastructure enhances firm exports are not well understood. By adopting a micro-level firm perspective, this study conducts theoretical analysis and empirical tests on two aspects—cost reduction and the maintenance of trade relationships. These efforts contribute empirical evidence to deepen our understanding of the underlying reasons for how power infrastructure promotes firm exports. Third, it designs a novel framework for identifying the causal effects induced by power infrastructure. Current research often measures power infrastructure or electricity supply using proxies such as capacity utilization rates or levels of electricity consumption, which can lead to endogeneity issues due to reverse causality. This study innovatively selects the Three Gorges Power Transmission as a quasi-natural experiment for power infrastructure, employing a DID model to effectively mitigate potential endogeneity problems and enhance the accuracy of causal inference. |
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