Christian Volpe Martincus

Export Promotion: Bundled Services Work Better

Export promotion agencies provide exporters with a broad range of services, going from counselling to sponsoring their participation in international trade missions and fairs. These services may have heterogeneous effects and thus contribute differently to achieve the goals of these organisations. Empirical evidence on their relative effectiveness is rather limited. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature. We compare the impact of different public trade promotion programmes on the extensive and intensive margin of firms exports, both to each other and with respect to no participation in these activities, by applying multiple treatment matching difference-in-differences on highly disaggregated export data for the whole population of Colombian exporters over the period 2003-06. We find that use of programmes that combine different services is associated with better export performance than their basic individual components, primarily along the country-extensive margin.

Public programmes to promote firms’ exports in developing countries: are there heterogeneous effects by size categories?

Several countries have implemented programmes to support their firms’ internationalization efforts. Their impacts are likely to be heterogeneous over firm size categories because these programmes are primarily intended and expected to benefit smaller companies. Whether this is or not the case is still an open question. In this article, we aim at filling this gap in the literature by providing evidence on the effects of trade promotion programmes on the export performance of firms within different size segments using a rich firm level dataset for Argentina over the period 2002 to 2006. We find that these effects are indeed larger for smaller firms.

The Impact of Export Promotion Institutions on Trade: Is It the Intensive or the Extensive Margin?

This article provides evidence on the channels through which export promotion institutions affect bilateral trade using a sample of Latin American and Caribbean countries over the period 1995 to 2004. We find that these institutions have a larger impact on the extensive margin of exports, especially in the case of trade promotion organizations.

Export promotion activities in developing countries: What kind of trade do they promote?

Information problems involved in trading differentiated goods are a priori acuter than those associated with trading more homogeneous products. The impact of export promotion activities intending to address these problems can therefore be expected to differ across goods with different degree of differentiation. Empirical evidence on this respect is virtually inexistent. This article aims at filling this gap in the literature by providing estimates of the effect of these activities over firms trading different goods using highly disaggregated export data for the whole population of Costa Rican exporters over the period 2001–2006. We find that trade promotion actions favor an increase of exports along the extensive margin, in particular, in terms of destination countries, in the case of firms that are already selling differentiated goods. However, these actions do not seem to encourage exporter to start exporting these goods. Further, no significant impacts are observed for firms exporting reference-priced and homogeneous goods.

Spatial Effects of Trade Policy: Evidence from Brazil

Does trade policy shape a countrys internal economic geography? Empirical evidence on the spatial effects of trade policy in developing countries is limited. This paper contributes to this literature by looking at the experience of Brazil over the 1990s. In particular, an econometric analysis of the determinants of industrial location using data on regional manufacturing employment as well as data on several region and industry characteristics over the period 1990–1998 is performed. Estimation results suggest that trade openness favored location in states closer to the largest neighbor trading partner and that this effect increased through the end of the 1990s.

Trade Policy and Export Diversification: What Should Colombia Expect from the FTA with the United States?

Sectoral concentration of exports has been a longstanding matter of concern for policymakers in developing countries. According to economic theory and recent empirical evidence, improved market access through trade agreements is likely to favor export diversification. In this article, it is assessed whether this has been the case for Colombian exports to the United States and whether an FTA with the United States would help Colombia diversify their exports. We find that lower tariffs have indeed favored exports of new products from Colombia. Predictions suggest that the FTA is likely to induce further diversification, but only up to a certain point.

Economic integration agreements and production fragmentation: evidence on the extensive margin

In this article we present evidence on the impact of economic integration agreements (EIAs) on production fragmentation based on a direct measure of offshoring: the number of vertically integrated foreign subsidiaries located in partner countries. We find that EIAs favour the formation of cross-border production networks. Further, this effect is stronger when agreements are deeper.

Transportation and trade interactions: a trade facilitation perspective

Trade facilitation policies intend to simplify administrative processes and accelerate the handling of shipments across borders. Recent research shows that these policies have substantial effects on trade flows. In this chapter, we discuss what the existing evidence for trade implies for the provision of transportation services. In addition, we make use of a particular policy change, an upgrade to a new transit trade regime, to illustrate the many direct and indirect linkages between trade facilitation and transportation. These multiple connections imply that a well-functioning transportation sector is important to realize the full potential of trade facilitation policies. Our conceptual and empirical analyses show that, despite an increase in demand for transportation services, the effect of trade facilitation on freight rates and the underlying transportation sector is far from obvious. This calls for future research to examine equilibrium adjustment channels to trade facilitation policies in the transportation sector.

Supervivencia de los nuevos exportadores en países en desarrollo: ¿es importante diversificar? .

Estudios recientes han demostrado que los paises en desarrollo pueden exportar con mayor rendimiento si son capaces de aumentar la duracion de sus relaciones comerciales. Las evidencias de la duracion de este tipo de relaciones a nivel empresarial son practicamente inexistentes. En este articulo, pretendemos rellenar esta laguna analizando que determina la supervivencia de las exportaciones mediante datos a nivel empresarial para toda la poblacion de nuevos exportadores peruanos en el periodo 2000-2006. En particular, planteamos una pregunta: ?es importante como diversifican las empresas? Concluimos que la diversificacion geografica aumenta la probabilidad de supervivencia en los mercados de exportacion que la diversificacion de los productos.

El impacto de los costes de transporte en el comercio de Latinoamérica y el Caribe .

El presente articulo resume un informe preparado por el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo sobre el impacto de los costes de transporte en el comercio de Latinoamerica y el Caribe. A partir de un solido analisis tecnico (con bases de datos de gran tamano y detalle) y una serie de estudios de casos, aporta una completa vision de la importancia de los costes de transporte como barrera para el comercio de la region. Apela a una agenda de integracion mas amplia y equilibrada centrada no solo en las barreras de comercio tradicionales, sino tambien en los costes (como los asociados a la infraestructura relacionada con el transporte).