Abstract

Transport corridors can improve access to international markets without necessarily changing the quality of firms’ participation in them. This study examines whether digital government helps translate the connectivity created by China’s New Western Land–Sea Corridor into broader and more sophisticated international engagement. The analysis uses 26,160 firm-year observations covering 2003–2023 and treats cities’ staggered entry into the corridor as a quasi-experimental setting. A multiperiod difference-in differences framework estimates the corridor effect, while an interaction with a city-level digital government index assesses institutional complementarity. Because direct firm-level customs data are unavailable, international participation is represented by foreign shareholdings among the ten largest shareholders, and participation quality by the presence of a Fortune Global 500 foreign shareholder. Corridor participation increases the scale proxy but has no significant unconditional effect on the quality indicator. Digital government positively moderates both outcomes. The interaction remains positive under instrumental-variable estimation, province-by-year controls, city-level clustering, and selection-sensitivity analysis. Mechanism regressions associate the interaction with lower expense burdens, greater information visibility, and faster working-capital and fixed-asset turnover. Subgroup results suggest that digital administration can compensate for institutional and service deficiencies, while the quality response is particularly evident among non-state-owned enterprises. These patterns support coordinating transport investment with administrative interoperability, accessible public services, and digitally supported compliance. Their interpretation remains conditional on the ownership-based outcome measures, the assumptions underlying staggered policy identification, and the indirect nature of the mechanism indicators. Digital government appears to strengthen the conversion of corridor access into firm-level international participation, although the evidence does not directly measure export volumes or product quality.