政府采购全流程电子化与企业跨区域竞争

Abstract

The key to building a unified national market lies in dismantling local protectionism and market segmentation. As a core hub connecting government demand with enterprise supply, government procurement is large in scale and broad in reach, and its degree of openness directly affects market integration. Under conventional procurement arrangements, however, the territorial character of offline procedures substantially raises participation costs for nonlocal firms and weakens competition in the government procurement market. In recent years, China has continued to advance the full-process digitalization of government procurement, incorporating the entire procurement chain into digital platforms. While improving procurement efficiency, the reform has had the effect of lowering barriers to cross-regional transactions. This paper examines whether the reform effectively promotes firms' cross-regional competition and thereby offers practical guidance for building a unified national market. Using micro-level government procurement data from China, this paper employs a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of the full-process digitalization of government procurement on firms' cross-regional competition. The baseline results show that the reform significantly increases the probability that a nonlocal firm wins a procurement project. Mechanism analysis reveals that the reform operates through two pathways. On the one hand, it lowers the transaction costs of nonlocal firms' participation in procurement and broadens the scope of competition, allowing more nonlocal firms to enter the competitive process and gain opportunities to win contracts. On the other hand, it strengthens regulatory constraints through comprehensive electronic records and traceable procedures, improves nonlocal firms' expectations regarding procedural fairness, and consequently increases their willingness to participate and their probability of winning. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the policy effect is more pronounced for firms with higher registered capital, construction and service projects, and open-tender projects. The effect is stronger in regions with lower fiscal pressure, higher levels of digital economy development, and higher fiscal transparency. Further analysis shows that full-process digitalization significantly improves procurement efficiency and reduces procurement costs.