Evaluation of China's live streaming e-commerce industry policies based on a three-dimensional analysis framework

PLoS One. 2024 May 14;19(5):e0301451. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301451. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

As an emerging business modality and Internet format, live streaming e-commerce has developed rapidly since its emergence in 2016, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in late 2019, when an increasing number of businesses from other industries attracted participation. However, with the development of the live streaming e-commerce industry, the industry's market environment is becoming increasingly chaotic. Therefore, during this period, government departments continuously formulate and implement relevant industry policies. In order to exploring the cooperation network structure, policy content distribution, and implementation effectiveness characteristics among publishers, this paper constructs a three-dimensional analysis framework of policy from the perspective of policy tools, policy effectiveness evaluation and policy publishers. The results show that in terms of policy tools, the overall structure of policy tools in the live streaming e-commerce industry is unreasonable, and different types of policy tools are significantly diverse. The proportion of environmental policy tools is greater than that of demand-based and supply-based policy tools, accounting for 62.97%, and among them, the tools related to industry regulation and management account for the largest proportion of the total, which greatly suppresses the enthusiasm of various entities in the industry for development. In terms of policy effectiveness evaluation, most of the policies do not formulate detailed long-, medium-, or short-term goals, nor are the policy priorities, incentive measures, or action modes perfect, indicating that the government's pushing and pulling forces for the live streaming e-commerce industry are insufficient. Finally, in the subject dimension of policy release, the synergy of relevant subjects is constantly improving, but there is also a phenomenon of over-concentration in the synergistic departments.

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • China
  • Commerce
  • Humans
  • Industry
  • Internet
  • SARS-CoV-2

Grants and funding

This study was supported from Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant Number: LY22G010004), which derived from the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation Committee. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and no authors received a salary from any of my funders.