Export Promotion Agencies: What Works and What Doesn't
By D. Lederman, Marcelo Olarreaga, Lucy Payton. 2006
162 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The number of national export promotion agencies (EPAs) has tripled over the past two decades. While more countries have made them part of their national export strategy, studies have criticized their efficiency in developing countries (Hogan, Keesing, and Singer 1991). Partly in reaction to these critiques, EPAs have been retooled (see International Trade Centre, ITC, 1998 or 2000, for example). This paper studies the impact of existing EPAs and their strategies based on a new data set covering 104 industrial and developing countries. Results suggest that on average they have a strong and statistically significant impact on exports. For each $1 of export promotion, the paper estimates a $40 increase in exports for the median EPA. However, there is heterogeneity across regions, levels of development, and types of instruments. Furthermore, there are 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/7ab80c8dc25bdb7314a55281bfc9bcf6609bce4f
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Citations in the corpus
- Beyond The Average Effects: The Distributional Impacts of Export Promotion Programs in Developing Countries (2010, background): “Over the last two decades, the number of export promotion agencies has increased by a factor of three (see Lederman et al., 2006).”
- Is Export Promotion Effective in Developing Countries? Firm-Level Evidence on the Intensive and Extensive Margins of Exports (2008, background): “…foreign buyers may be sub-optimally low (see Rauch, 1996).3 By attenuating information problems, actions executed by export promotion agencies such as PROMPEX can reduce transaction costs thus fostering trade (see, e.g., Gil-Pareja et al., 2005; Nitsch, 2005; Lederman et al., 2006; and Rose, 2007).”
- Aid-for-trade facilitation (2009, unknown): “With respect to the effectiveness of export promotion agencies (EPAs), Lederman et al. (2006) find that EPAs, on average, have a positive and statistically significant impact on exports.”
- Firms' Exporting Behavior under Quality Constraints (2009, unknown): “…each of the four countries in our sample, the fraction of exporters in each of 40 size quantiles (defined by industry).2 Though this fraction increases with size, there are still many 1The number of export promotion agencies in the world has tripled in the last two decades (Lederman et al. 2007).”
- Internationalization and Innovation of Firms: Evidence and Policy (2013, unknown): “Size – 4 category of firms’ size by number of employees: micro (10-19), small (20-49), medium (50-249), large (250+).”