ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1587019
This article is part of the Research TopicChallenges and Solutions in Forecasting and Decision-Making in Marine Economy and Management, Volume IIView all 7 articles
The effects of digitalization on the quality of marine economic development: Evidence from a micro-level perspective
Provisionally accepted
- 1Zhejiang Wanli University, Ningbo, China
- 2Minnan Normal University, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China
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Digitalization is transforming the marine economy at an accelerating pace, yet its effects on the Quality of Marine Economic Development (QMED) and the pathways driving these changes are underexplored. This study investigates these dynamics using an unbalanced panel of 168 A-share listed marine firms in China over the period 2003-2023. We apply a two-way fixed effects model to estimate the effect of digitalization on QMED and explore its mechanisms, complemented by heterogeneity analyses across firm sizes, industry types, government attention, and human capital levels. The results show that digitalization improves QMED, with a 0.01 rise in the digitalization index-about one-fifth of its mean-lifting TFP Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of marine firms by roughly 0.599, or 6.85% of the average TFP. Digitalization boosts QMED by enhancing firms' resource allocation efficiency and spurring technological innovation. Larger firms benefit more than smaller ones, while labor-intensive industries outpace capital-intensive ones in QMED gains. Higher human capital levels weaken digitalization's positive effect on QMED. These findings suggest practical strategies for practitioners, such as adopting cost-effective digital tools like automation and big data analytics in labor-intensive sectors and providing subsidies or financing to support smaller firms' digitalization. These insights highlight digitalization's uneven effects and provide a foundation for targeted policy design to enhance marine economic development.These insights highlight digitalization's uneven effects across firm sizes, marine sectors, and levels of human capital, providing a basis for targeted policy design.
Keywords: digitalization, Marine economic development, total factor productivity, Resource allocation efficiency, technological innovation
Received: 03 Mar 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shen and Zhong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Weiteng Shen, Zhejiang Wanli University, Ningbo, China
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