Jerónimo Carballo

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.

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.