Exporting and productivity: Evidence for Egypt and Morocco

Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso

No 136, University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the link between exporting and importing activities and firm performance using a rich dataset on Egyptian and Moroccan firms. We test the export premium, self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypotheses using a number of firm characteristics. Our analysis also includes importing activities as a source of learning and considers their effects on productivity changes. A differences-in-differences matching estimator is used to address the endogeneity bias of target variables. The main results for Egyptian firms echo those reported for other countries using firm-level data, namely exporters are larger and more productive than non-exporters. In contrast, Moroccan exporters and non-exporters are strikingly similar. More specifically, no evidence is found of pre or post-entry differences in labour productivity for Moroccan firms.

Keywords: firms; new-new trade theory; productivity; exporting; panel data; Egypt; Morocco (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cegedp:136

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