Do African manufacturing firms learn from exporting?

Arne Bigsten (), Paul Collier, Stefan Dercon (), Marcel Fachamps, Bernard Gauthier, Jan Willem Gunning (), Abena Oduro, Remco Oostendorp, Catherine Pattillo, Mans M. Soderbom (), Francis John Teal and Albert Zeufack
Additional contact information
Marcel Fachamps: CSAE, Oxford University
Bernard Gauthier: Free University, Amsterdam
Abena Oduro: University of Ghana, Legon
Catherine Pattillo: Research Department IMF
Albert Zeufack: The World Bank

Development and Comp Systems from EconWPA

Abstract: In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Estimating simultaneously a production function and an export regression that control for unobserved firm effects, we find both significant efficiency gains from exporting, supporting the learning- byexporting hypothesis, and evidence for self-selection of more efficient firms into exporting. The evidence of learning-by-exporting suggests that Africa has much to gain from orientating its manufacturing sector towards exporting.

JEL-codes: O P (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-dev
Date: 2004-09-29
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 33
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://129.3.20.41/eps/dev/papers/0409/0409071.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do African Manufacturing Firms Learn from Exporting? (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpdc:0409071

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Development and Comp Systems from EconWPA
Series data maintained by EconWPA ().