Did Export Diversification Soften the Impact of the Global Financial Crisis?

Rafael Romeu () and Nelson Costa Neto

No 2011/099, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: This study considers the role of export diversification in determining trade outcomes during the global financial crisis. The impact of export diversification (or concentration) is measured by assessing three different dimensions of specialization. First, concentration by geographic destination is considered; that is, whether the bulk of exports from a country go to many or few trading partners. Second, industry/sectoral concentration is considered; that is, whether a country’s exports are scattered across many industries and sectors, or concentrated in just a few. Third, product concentration is considered; that is, whether countries produce many products within their export sectors or just a few. The workhorse gravity trade model is adapted with trade diversification as an additional trade cost, and the model solution is empirically tested on a dataset containing over 500 thousand observations for Latin America. Industry and product concentration are found to significantly affect the resilience of Latin American countries’ trade during the global financial crisis - increasing the diversity of both export sectors and export products within sectors by one standard deviation reduces the quarterly decline in exports by approximately 4.7 percent. Diversifying exports across many different trading partners is not found to significantly affect outcomes.

Keywords: WP; trading partner (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2011-05-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=24821 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:imf:imfwpa:2011/099

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().