What Explains the Low Survival Rate of Developing Country Export Flows?

• Tác giả: Christian Saborowski
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 910.91 Geography of and travel in areas, regions, places in general
• Thông tin xuất bản: World Bank, 2013
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 320438
• Chủ đề: 1. bilateral trade; 2. econometric analysis; 3. economic size; 4. expected return; 5. export growth

Tóm tắt

Successful export growth and diversification require not only entry into new export products and markets but also the survival and growth of export flows. For a cross-country dataset of product-level bilateral export flows, exporting is found to be a perilous activity, especially in low-income countries. Unobserved individual heterogeneity in product-level export flow data prevails even when a wide range of observed country and product characteristics are controlled for. This questions previous studies that used the Cox proportional hazards model to analyze export survival. Following Meyer (1990), a Prentice-Gloeckler (1978) model is estimated, amended with a gamma mixture distribution summarizing unobserved individual heterogeneity. The empirical results confirm the significance of a range of product- as well as country-specific factors in determining the survival of new export flows. Important for policymaking is the finding of the value of learning-by-doing for export survival: experience with exporting the same product to other markets or different products to the same market is found to strongly increase the chance of export survival. A better understanding of such learning effects could substantially improve the effectiveness of export promotion strategies.