Impact of Digital Transformation on the Competitiveness of Agriculture-Related FirmsFrom the Perspective of Firm Heterogeneity

Digital transformation has become an important means of transforming and upgrading traditional growth drivers and of fostering and expanding new growth drivers, and has also brought new opportunities and challenges to the development of agriculture-related firms. The paper analyzes the impact mechanism of digital transformation on the competitiveness of agriculture-related firms at the theoretical level, and makes an empirical test of its impact effects. The findings are as follows. Theoretically, digital transformation enhances the competitiveness of agriculture-related firms by improving their productivity, product competitiveness and market responsiveness; in the empirical test, the results of baseline regression analysis confirm that digital transformation has a significant positive effect on the competitiveness of agriculture-related firms, and the regression results support this conclusion after controlling the endogeneity of the model, replacing the regression samples and changing the estimation method. This shows that digital transformation has indeed improved the competitiveness of agriculture-related firms. Furthermore, this effect is significantly heterogeneous in terms of the size and age of firms, but there is no significant heterogeneity in the regions where the firms are located.