The Impact of the Digital Economy on the High-Quality Development of Foreign Trade: Evidence from City-Level Panel Data in Anhui Province

The digital economy is reshaping global trade and creating new opportunities for the high-quality development of foreign trade.Taking the prefecture-level cities of Anhui Province during 2010–2023 as the empirical sample,this paper constructs a composite index of digital economy development along four dimensions—digital infrastructure,digital industrialisation,the digitalisation of industry,and digital talent—and an index of the high-quality development of foreign trade covering foreign trade volume,foreign trade structure and foreign trade competitiveness, both measured using the entropy weight method.A two-way fixed effects model is estimated to examine the effect of the digital economy on the high-quality development of foreign trade in Anhui.The results show that the digital economy exerts a significantly positive promoting effect on the high-quality development of foreign trade in the province,and that this effect displays pronounced regional and temporal heterogeneity. The findings carry practical implications for how Chinese provinces can seize the opportunities of the digital era to advance the high-quality development of foreign trade.