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An analysis on the policy evolution of cross-border ecommerce industry in China from the perspective of sustainability

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Abstract

The rapid development of China’s cross-border e-commerce has largely benefited from the support of industrial policies. This paper adopts social network analysis and content analysis, builds an analytical framework from the four dimensions: policy time, policy document type, text subject, and content theme. We conduct a quantitative analysis of 81 cross-border e-commerce industry policy texts from 2008 to 2018, and systematically reveal the characteristics of China’s cross-border e-commerce industry policy system, including document structure, subject network and content theme, as well as the time trend of those characteristics. The results show that China has initially established a cross-border e-commerce industry policy system with reasonable text structure and relatively concentrated themes, which covers all business links of the cross-border e-commerce industry ecological chain. Among them, four departments, including the Ministry of Commerce, the General Administration of Customs, the Administration of Taxation and the Ministry of Finance, are at the core of the cooperation network on industrial policy issuance. Customs management, foreign exchange receipt and payment, business pattern, tax administration, credit management, inside and outside coordination are the most concerned themes of cross-border e-commerce industry policy system during 2008–2018.

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Funding

This paper was supported by the National Social Science Fund Projects of China (No. 19BGL098) and the Ministry of education of Humanities and Social Science Project of China (No. 18JJD790013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Modern Business Research Center, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Liang Xiao & Yanan Zhang

  2. School of Management and E-Business, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Liang Xiao

  3. School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Yanan Zhang

Authors
  1. Liang Xiao
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  2. Yanan Zhang
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Contributions

Conceptualization, LX; Data curation, LX and YZ; Formal analysis, YZ; Funding acquisition, LX; Investigation, LX and YZ; Methodology, LX and YZ; Project administration, LX; Resources, YZ; Software, YZ; Supervision, LX and YZ; Validation, LX and YZ; Visualization, YZ; Writing—original draft, LX and YZ; Writing—review & editing, LX and YZ.

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Correspondence to Liang Xiao or Yanan Zhang.

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Xiao, L., Zhang, Y. An analysis on the policy evolution of cross-border ecommerce industry in China from the perspective of sustainability. Electron Commer Res 22, 875–899 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-020-09427-y

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