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

Dany Bahar, Rodrigo Wagner, Ernesto Stein and Samuel Rosenow

No 103, Growth Lab Working Papers from Harvard's Growth Lab

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
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Working Paper: The Birth and Growth of New Export Clusters: Which Mechanisms Drive Diversification? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:glh:wpfacu:103

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