Export promotion agencies: Do they work?

By D. Lederman, Marcelo Olarreaga, Lucy Payton. 2010

286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The number of national export promotion agencies (EPAs) has tripled over the last two decades. While more countries made them part of their export strategy, studies criticized their efficacy in developing countries. EPAs were retooled, partly in response to these critiques. This paper studies the impact of today's EPAs and their strategies, based on new survey data covering 103 developing and developed countries. Results suggest that on average they have a statistically significant effect on exports. Our identification strategies highlight the importance of EPA services for overcoming foreign trade barriers and solving asymmetric information problems associated with exports of heterogeneous goods. There are also strong diminishing returns, suggesting that as far as EPAs are concerned, small is beautiful.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6834404a55cf825b82d0bbd81a42f56c63a31c0d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Development

1. Torfinn Harding
2. B. Javorcik

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Torfinn Harding
2. B. Javorcik
3. Laura Alfaro
4. Wen-Jung Chen
5. Lee G. Branstetter
6. Zhiqiang Liu
7. Nuno Crespo
8. M. P. Fontoura

In Strategy and Management

1. Torfinn Harding
2. B. Javorcik
3. Laura Alfaro
4. Wen-Jung Chen
5. Zhiqiang Liu
6. Lee G. Branstetter
7. M. P. Fontoura
8. Nuno Crespo

Citations in the corpus

• Roll Out the Red Carpet and They Will Come: Investment Promotion and FDI Inflows† (2011, background): “Using cross-country data, Lederman et al. (2010) conclude that export promotion agencies have on average a strong and statistically significant impact on exports.5,6 The second literature relevant to our study postulates that information asymmetries and poor business climate constitute a…”
• Internationalization and Innovation of Firms: Evidence and Policy (2013, unknown): “Employees (20-49) 168 1,150 1,135 176 1,407 1,244 805 6,085”
• Does aid for trade enhance export performance? Investigating on the infrastructure channel (2012, unknown): “Thus, the export equations to be estimated by Two Step Least Squares (2SLS) are the following: (IIa) ( ) i V As a robustness check, following Lederman et al. (2010), we choose to introduce sequentially two additional control variables outside of the model.”