The Impact of Exports on Economic Growth: It's the Market Form

This paper unites explanations about the growth effects from various trade characteristics, proposing the market form into which a country exports as the main driver. Exporting into concentrated world markets (oligopolies or monopolies) leads to higher profit margins, similar to fundamental microeconomic logic. The paper develops an index measuring the average market form of a country's exports. This index produces a positive and statistically significant coefficient in conventional growth regressions. A one standard deviation increase is suggested to raise growth by 0.885 percentage points. This result holds for numerous extensions and seems particularly important for developing economics.