The Birth and Growth of New Export Clusters: Which Mechanisms Drive Diversification?

Dany Bahar, Rodrigo Wagner, Ernesto Stein and Samuel Rosenow

No 86a, CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University

Abstract: Export diversification is associated with economic growth and development. Our paper explores competing mechanisms that mediate the emergence and growth of export products based on their economic relatedness to pre-existing exports. Our innovation is to simultaneously consider supply factors like labor, sourcing and technology; as well as demand factors like industry specific customer-linkages in a global setting. We find that, while technology and workforce similarity explain emergence and growth, pre-existing downstream industries remain a robust predictor of diversification, especially for jump starting new exports in developing countries. Our global stylized fact generalizes Javorcik’s (2004) view that spillovers are more likely in backward linkages.

Keywords: comparative advantage; exports; relatedness; spillovers; R&D; patents; labor; upstream; downstream (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 O14 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/files/growthlab/files/clusters_cidrfwp_86.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Birth and Growth of New Export Clusters: Which Mechanisms Drive Diversification? (2017)
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:cid:wpfacu:86a

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University 79 John F. Kennedy Street. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chuck McKenney ().