The Origins and Dynamics of Export Superstars

Caroline Freund () and Martha Denisse Pierola

The World Bank Economic Review, 2020, vol. 34, issue 1, 28-47

Abstract: Export superstars are important for export growth and diversification and are typically born large. Firm-level data on manufacturing trade from 32 developing countries show that the top five exporters account for on average nearly one-third of exports, 47 percent of export growth, and a third of the growth due to export diversification over a five-year period. Within countries and industries, export growth is positively correlated with the share of exports in the top five firms. Most of the top five exporters were already large five (or eight) years ago or are new firms; it is rare for these export superstars to emerge from the bottom half of the distribution of firm sizes. For countries where detailed data exist, superstars are producers, not traders, and are primarily foreign owned.

Keywords: firm size distribution; export growth; export diversification; granularity; foreign ownership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhy011 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Origin and Dynamics of Export Superstars (2016)
Working Paper: The Origins and Dynamics of Export Superstars (2016)
Working Paper: The Origins and Dynamics of Export Superstars (2016)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:34:y:2020:i:1:p:28-47.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().