The Change of Operation Efficiency of Agricultural Product Wholesale Industry Under the Background of Digital Development
——the Empirical Test Based on Panel Threshold Model
Research Group
（Economic College，Hunan Agricultural University，Changsha 410128，Hunan，China）
Abstract：The development of the digital economy directly affects the operating efficiency of the agricultural product wholesale industry，leading and forcing the transformation and upgrading of this industry. In order to study the impact of digital development on the operating efficiency of this industry，the authors first construct a digital level indicator system from the two dimensions of digital infrastructure and digital technology application ，and use principal component analysis to determine the digital level，and then establish the panel threshold model taking digital level as the threshold variable and the operating efficiency measured by the SBM method as the explained variable. And then the provincial panel data from 2010 to 2018 are used to test the nonlinear relationship between digital development and operating efficiency. The results show that ：the overall impact of digital development on the operating efficiency is significantly positive ，but the effect of digital development on productivity can only be fully demonstrated when digitalization has been developed to a certain level ；the impact of digital development on operating efficiency has a dual threshold effect，that is，when the level of digitization is low，there is a productivity paradox phenomenon， the accelerated development stage of digitization will drive a substantial increase in operating efficiency ，and when the level of digitization is high，the promoting effect will be weakened. Further decomposition finds that ：the productivity effect of digital development comes more from digital infrastructure，and the positive impact will change to a single threshold effect ，which will be strong first，and then weak；the application of digital technology has not been tested to have significant impact ，and if current digital technology application has impact on the agricultural product wholesale industry is still uncertain. The agricultural product wholesale industry should seize the opportunity of digital economy development ，take the initiative to carry out digital transformation，further improve the construction of digital infrastructure，change the traditional operation and management model，and transform and upgrade towards the digital economy.
Key words：digital economy；digital level；agricultural products wholesale industry ；operation efficiency；panel threshold