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Original Articles

Cities export specialization

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ABSTRACT

We analyse whether more populated cities have an export specialization different from the one of less populated cities. Using very detailed product-level export data for Brazilian urban areas over the period 2000–2013, we show that more populated cities export proportionately more skill-intensive and complex goods than less populated cities. This result is consistent with the larger diversity of skills and the higher share of skilled workers in more populated cities.

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grants MINECO ECO2015-68057-R and ECO2016-79650-P], co-financed with The European Regional Development Fund, the Basque Government Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture [grant IT885-16], the Generalitat Valenciana [grant Prometeo II-2014-053] and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Spain [grant FPU-2010 for pre-doctoral education training].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Urban area population is obtained from the Census of the Brazilian Statistical Institute and calculated using the arranjos definition.

2 Available at http://en.dataviva.info/.

3 Brazilian Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade assigns exports to a municipality according to the location of the firm’s headquarter. This procedure might overestimate the amount of large cities’ exports. This limitation is also found in other studies that use city-level data (Istrate, Rothwell, and Katz Citation2010). However, we expect this bias to be similar for low-skill and high-skill products and for low-complexity and high-complexity products.

4 The narrow definition of manufacturing industries excludes agricultural and mineral raw materials, food and beverages, wood products, and nonmetallic minerals.

6 Available at http://www.unctad.info.

7 We estimate kernel regressions to obtain these nonparametric relationships.

8 Following Costinot (Citation2009), we expect exports to be log-supermodular in population and complexity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grants MINECO ECO2015-68057-R and ECO2016-79650-P], co-financed with The European Regional Development Fund, the Basque Government Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture [grant IT885-16], the Generalitat Valenciana [grant Prometeo II-2014-053] and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Spain [grant FPU-2010 for pre-doctoral education training].

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