Exporting and Productivity: Evidence for Egypt and Morocco
Center for European Governance and Economic Development Research Discussion Paper Number 136
38 Pages Posted: 3 Jul 2012
Date Written: 2012
Abstract
This paper investigates the link between exporting and importing activities and firm performance using a rich dataset on Egyptian and Moroccan firms. We test the export premium, self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypotheses using a number of firm characteristics. Our analysis also includes importing activities as a source of learning and considers their effects on productivity changes. A differences-in-differences matching estimator is used to address the endogeneity bias of target variables. The main results for Egyptian firms echo those reported for other countries using firm-level data, namely exporters are larger and more productive than non-exporters. In contrast, Moroccan exporters and non-exporters are strikingly similar. More specifically, no evidence is found of pre or post-entry differences in labour productivity for Moroccan firms.
Keywords: firms, new-new trade theory, productivity, exporting, panel data, Egypt, Morocco
JEL Classification: F10, F35
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