Exporting raises productivity in sub-Saharan African manufacturing firms

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that exporting helps firms to achieve higher productivity levels. This hypothesis is examined for a panel of manufacturing firms in nine African countries. The results indicate that exporters in these countries are more productive and, more importantly, exporters increase their productivity advantage after entry into the export market. While the first finding can be explained by selection-only the most productive firms engage in exporting-the latter cannot. The results are robust when unobserved productivity differences and self-selection into the export market are controlled for using different econometric methods. Scale economies are shown to be an important channel for the productivity advance. Credit constraints and contract enforcement problems prevent firms that only produce for the domestic market from fully exploiting scale economies.     

Exporting raises productivity in sub-Saharan African manufacturing firms

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that exporting helps firms to achieve higher productivity levels. This hypothesis is examined for a panel of manufacturing firms in nine African countries. The results indicate that exporters in these countries are more productive and, more importantly, exporters increase their productivity advantage after entry into the export market. While the first finding can be explained by selection–only the most productive firms engage in exporting–the latter cannot. The results are robust when unobserved productivity differences and self-selection into the export market are controlled for using different econometric methods. Scale economies are shown to be an important channel for the productivity advance. Credit constraints and contract enforcement problems prevent firms that only produce for the domestic market from fully exploiting scale economies.     

The Performance of Trading Firms in the Services Sectors – Comparable Evidence from Four EU Countries

We examine trade complexity and the implications of adding additional dimensions of trade for firm performance among services producers. We use unique firm‐level data to compare these patterns across four EU countries. Overall, services firms are relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms; they mostly trade goods and are more likely to import than to export. Trade in services is quite rare; services are more likely to be traded by firms already trading goods. Trading firms in the services sectors are significantly larger, more productive and pay higher wages than non‐traders. Two‐way traders outperform one‐way traders. Changes in trading status by either adding another dimension of trade (imports, exports) or another type of product (goods, services) are infrequent and are associated with significant preswitching premia. In contrast, learning effects from switching trading status are uncommon. This points to significant fixed cost of being engaged in trade and confirms some previous findings that trading services firms have similar traits as their manufacturing counterparts. Apart from greater trade participation in smaller countries, we do not observe systematic differences in terms of trade or switching premia between the four countries that might be attributable to differences in country characteristics.     

生产性服务效率、中间投入变化与中国制造企业生产率

通过使用中国服务企业的微观数据,分服务行业从投入效率与投入变化两个角度对制造业投入服务化影响制造企业生产率问题进行研究,结果显示:生产性服务投入效率的提高对中国制造企业生产率均产生正向促进效应(除教育服务外);生产性服务投入对较高生产率制造企业所产生的生产率促进效应更明显;随着高技术生产性服务投入的增加,其对制造企业生产率的正向促进效应增强,而随着中低技术生产性服务投入的增加,其对制造企业生产率的影响并不明显或者被削弱;生产性服务投入的增加提升了东部和中部地区制造企业生产率,却抑制了西部地区制造企业生产率。     

Virtuous Structures

This study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock price, productivity mediates the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Furthermore, we argue that key stakeholders’ social considerations are more valuable for firms with higher levels of discretionary cash and income stream uncertainty. Therefore, we hypothesize that those two contingencies moderate the mediated process of corporate social performance with financial performance. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of the U.S. manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2009, lends strong support for these hypotheses. In short, this paper uncovers a productivity-based, context-dependent mechanism underlying the relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance.     

Global sourcing,productivity and export intensity

This paper investigates the effect of global sourcing on firm performances by using data on Danish manufacturing firms during the period 1995–2006. The results show that firms with better ex-ante characteristics are more inclined to source intermediate inputs from abroad. The results also show that firms that source from different locations possess different ex-ante characteristics; the most productive source inputs from high-wage countries while capital stock and being an exporter are more important factors when sourcing from low-wage countries. Moreover, controlling for the endogeneity of both the sourcing decision and location by using instrument variable and DiD matching approach, the results seem also to suggest that firms that source inputs from high-wage countries benefited from doing so in terms of higher growth of productivity and export intensity. Firms that source inputs from low-wage countries, on the other hand, seem not to have experienced any significant impact on neither productivity nor export, not even three years after they started to source inputs from these countries.     

Do exports generate higher productivity? Evidence from Slovenia

I use matched sampling techniques to analyze whether firms that start exporting become more productive, controlling for the self-selection into export markets. To this end, I use micro data of Slovenian manufacturing firms operating in the period 1994-2000. Overall I find that export entrants become more productive once they start exporting. The productivity gap between exporters and their domestic counterparts increases further over time. These results also hold at the industry level and are robust to other controls that may be associated with increased productivity, such as private ownership. Using information on the (firm-level) destination of exports, I find that the productivity gains are higher for firms exporting towards high income regions.     

Foreign outsourcing, exporting, and FDI: A productivity comparison at the firm level

This paper documents how productivity varies with globalization modes, based on a firm-level data set covering all manufacturing industries in Japan without any firm-size threshold. Only a small fraction of firms outsource, export, or invest abroad. Foreign outsourcers and exporters tend to be less productive than the firms active in FDI or in multiple globalization modes but more productive than domestic firms. This productivity ordering is robust even when firm size, factor intensity, and/or industry are controlled for. This paper also finds that outsourcers are on average less capital intensive than other globalized firms.     

Location decision of heterogeneous multinational firms

We examine how multinational firms with heterogeneous total factor productivity (TFP) self-select into different host countries. Both aggregate- and firm-level estimates suggest that more productive French firms are more likely than their less efficient competitors to invest in relatively tough host countries. Countries with a smaller market potential, higher fixed costs of investment or lower import tariffs tend to have higher cutoff productivities and attract a greater proportion of productive multinationals. This self-selection mechanism remains largely robust when we control for unobserved firm and country heterogeneity and address potential TFP endogeneity.     

Firm exits as a determinant of new entry: Is there evidence of local creative destruction?

This study posits that a local process of creative destruction provides an impetus to regional industrial renewal. We argue that exits of older firms release resources that stimulate local entry. New entrants add value to these resources by redeploying them in more productive uses. We test our hypotheses with a unique longitudinal database encompassing the entry and exit of Canadian manufacturing enterprises. We find that exits of old firms increase entry and that on average new entrants are more productive. Persistent high local rates of exit, however, deter entry.     

Financial Analysis of Palestinian Industry Including Small Scale Firms

The study aims to explore the financial aspects of the Palestinian industry, and to investigate productivity and efficiency of small scale industry compared with large scale firms. In order to help policy makers in industrial planning in the new emerged Palestinian state. A special instrument has been used to collect the financial and quantitative data for the related manufacturing firms from a random sample of 215 Palestinian firms. The one way analysis of variance test was used to examine whether the mean scores differ significantly among scale sizes of the Palestinian industry concerning the selected performance measures. In addition, the Scheffe test was used as a post hoc comparison way to identify which scale size firms' performance differs than the other two scale sizes.The research revealed that small scale firms in Palestinian industry have higher labor productivity values than large scale firms, while large scale firms accomplished higher net profit margin compared to small scale industry. Creating an additional job in large scale Palestinian industry needs less cost than creating a job in small scale industry, and large scale firms have better opportunity in getting external financing than small firms.     

Firm Heterogeneity and FDI in Distribution Services

Distribution services play a large role in intermediating production and consumption across borders. Using firm‐level data on Japanese multinationals in wholesale and retail sectors, this study examines FDI decisions of distribution firms for local distribution services at the extensive and intensive margin. Consistent with the model of heterogeneous firms on multinational production, I find that more productive multinationals are more likely than less productive multinationals to enter a larger number of markets, to penetrate less attractive markets and to generate larger sales per each market. While these findings are consistent with previous evidence on manufacturing multinationals, I find some distinctive determinants of FDI in distribution services.     

Firm heterogeneity in services trade: Micro-level evidence from eight OECD countries

This paper shows that smaller and less productive firms, as well as first-time exporters, are overproportionally affected by services trade barriers using micro-data from Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. For these firms, both the propensity to export and export volumes to less restrictive destinations are significantly higher than to more restrictive destinations. In contrast, policy barriers measured by the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) do not affect export decisions of the largest, most productive and experience services firms. The pattern holds for two major modes of supply, cross-border services exports and foreign affiliate sales of services firms. The findings are consistent with firm sorting mechanisms in trade models with heterogeneous firms and hysteresis of export participation in the presence of sunk export costs.     

生产性服务贸易对制造业生产效率影响的实证研究——基于价值链视角

随着经济发展和资源配置的全球化,生产性服务贸易与制造业的相互作用日益加深,有效地开展生产性服务贸易可以发挥规模经济从而提高制造业生产效率和资源配置效率。文章基于价值链视角,分析了生产性服务贸易与制造业分工的可能性并对其生产效率的影响程度进行了实证分析,结果表明不同生产性服务贸易部门对不同要素密集度制造业生产效率的促进作用和作用路径并不一致。根据分析结果,提出了针对不同制造业重点选择不同的生产性服务贸易部门和贸易方式,同时有效保护我国生产性服务业发展的对策建议。     

Learning from exporting: The moderating effect of technological capabilities

There is evidence that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. Scholars argue that exporters may have access to knowledge spillovers in foreign markets and use this knowledge to become more efficient. However, we know little about whether learning from exporting is affected by firms’ heterogeneous resource endowments and, particularly, about the specific firm characteristics that matter the most in this respect. Utilizing a sample of 1534 Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2002, we empirically analyze whether a firm's technological capabilities (proxied by its relative R&D expenditures) affect its ability to learn from the interaction with foreign agents. We find that firm productivity increases after exporting for all firms. However, ex post productivity improvements are larger for the more technologically advanced firms than they are for their less technologically advanced counterparts. Our results show that some firms stand to benefit more from exporting than others and hint at the importance of absorptive capacity for knowledge acquisition overseas.     

Multinational activity of European firms and heterogeneity

This paper offers an empirical assessment of the multinational activity of European firms. It takes the predictions of models of firm heterogeneity and FDI activity as a reference to explore the characteristics of multinational firms from 30 European countries. We use a data set, based on ORBIS, which links information of parent–affiliate pairs of firms. Our results show that more productive firms have greater multinational activity in terms of both scope, the number of foreign markets where they invest, and scale, the volume of local sales by subsidiaries active in foreign markets. The estimation of gravity equations shows that country characteristics that encourage multinational activity successively induce the entry of less productive parent firms. We confirm this asymmetry for the GDPs of the home and host countries, distance, contiguity and other standard gravity equation variables.     

Factor Intensity,product switching,and productivity: Evidence from Chinese exporters

This paper analyzes how a firm's specialization in its core products after exporting affects its factor intensity and productivity. Using Chinese manufacturing firm data for the 1998–2007 period, we find that firms become less capital-intensive but more productive after exporting, compared to non-exporters that share similar ex ante characteristics. To rationalize these findings that contrast with existing studies, we develop a variant of the model by Bernard, Redding, and Schott (2010, 2011) to consider firms producing multiple products with varying capital intensity. The model predicts that when a firm in a labor-abundant country starts exporting, it specializes in its core competencies by allocating more resources to produce more labor-intensive products. Firm ex ante productivity is associated with a smaller decline in capital intensity after exporting. A sharper post-export decline in capital intensity is associated with a larger increase in measured total factor productivity. We find firm-level evidence supporting these predictions. Using transaction-level data for the 2000–2006 period, we show that Chinese new exporters add products that are less capital-intensive than their existing products and drop those that are more capital-intensive in subsequent years.     

对外直接投资与企业生产率——基于中国上市公司的实证分析

文章先利用K-S检验研究中国制造类上市公司的全要素生产率分布,结果与HMY模型的预期一致,对外直接投资企业的全要素生产率分布显著优于出口企业和仅在国内生产销售的企业。进一步探讨对外直接投资与生产率的关系,结果表明,企业在进行对外直接投资时不存在显著的自我选择效应,但是,对外直接投资能够促进企业生产率的提高,具有学习效应。     

Export Entry,Export Exit and Productivity in German Manufacturing Industries

This paper contributes to the flourishing literature on exports and productivity by using a unique newly available panel of exporting establishments from the manufacturing sector of Germany from 1995 to 2004 to test three hypotheses motivated by a theoretical model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that stop exporting in year t were in t?1 less productive than firms that continue to export in t. (H2) Firms that start to export in year t are less productive than firms that export both in year t?1 and in year t. (H3) Firms from a cohort of export starters that still export in the last year of the panel were more productive in the start year than firms from the same cohort that stopped exporting in between. While results for West Germany support all three hypotheses, this is only the case for (H1) and (H2) in East Germany.     

Firm Growth and Liquidity Constraints: A Dynamic Analysis

Using a large unbalanced panel data set of Portuguese manufacturing firms surviving over the period from 1990 to 2001, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether liquidity constraints faced by business firms affect firm growth. We use a GMM-system to estimate a dynamic panel data model of firm growth that incorporates cash flow as a measure of liquidity constraints and persistence of growth. The model is estimated for all size classes, including micro firms. Our findings reveal that smaller and younger firms have higher growth-cash flow sensitivities than larger and more mature firms. This is consistent with the suggestion that financial constraints on firm growth may be relatively more severe for small and young firms. Nevertheless, the same finding can be interpreted in a different way if we consider the more recent literature which interpret the higher investment/cash flow sensitivity of younger and smaller firm in absence of financial market imperfection as the outcome of these firms reaction to the fact that realisation of their cash flows reveals them the direction to go in presence of uncertainty of their growth prospect. Besides, firms that were small and young at the beginning of the sample period exhibited more persistent growth than those that were large and old. Finally, these results have significant policy implications.