This paper empirically investigates the impact of digital transformation on corporate international strategy. With a dataset of the Chinese stock market from 2014 to 2020, our empirical results reveal that digital transformation has a positive impact on the international strategy of Chinese enterprises. More specifically, firms with digital transformation are more likely to implement international strategy, and firms with a higher degree of digital transformation are associated with a higher level of internationalization. In addition, our empirical results reveal that corporate innovation exhibits the mediation effect. Moreover, our findings show that the impact of digital transformation is more pronounced for private firms and non-high-tech enterprises, and this impact is also moderated by high institutional development in eastern China. Our findings survive numerous robustness checks.

This paper takes the industrial poverty alleviation of local state-owned enterprises in China as the research object, and takes the local state-owned enterprises listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares in China from 2016 to 2020 as the sample to empirically test the impact of industrial poverty alleviation on the sustainable economic growth of the region and consider the regulatory effect of digital innovation. This study found that China’s local industrial poverty reduction behavior in state-owned enterprises can effectively promote regional economic growth. Moreover, the digital innovation produced a regulating effect; that is, if enterprises carry out digital innovation and have a higher degree of digital innovation, their industrial poverty alleviation behavior will have a stronger role in promoting regional economic growth. This conclusion still holds even after controlling for factors of robustness and endogeneity. In addition, the study of influence mechanisms found that the proportion of primary industry in GDP was the mediating effect of industrial poverty alleviation on regional economic growth, and the proportion of primary industry in GDP had a partial mediating effect. Further heterogeneous group testing shows that the impact of industrial poverty alleviation on regional economically sustainable growth is more obvious in agriculture-related, local state-owned enterprises; non-high-tech, local state-owned enterprises; and local state-owned enterprises with subsequent poverty alleviation plans. The empirical evidence in this paper verifies the role of local state-owned enterprises’ participation in industrial poverty alleviation in promoting regional economic growth. It is a useful supplement to the research literature on the economic consequences of Chinese enterprises’ participation in targeted poverty alleviation, which helps to better understand such a phenomenon and also provides a powerful explanation for China’s poverty alleviation achievements.