Exporting and firm productivity: evidence for Egypt and Morocco

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

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F10
• F35

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the support and collaboration of Project ECO2017-83255-C3-3-P (AEI, FEDER, EU) and from project UJI-B2017-33. She also would like to thank the participants in the 14th Workshop in International Economics held in Goettingen for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades: [Grant Number ECO2017-83255-C3-3-P (AEI, FEDER, EU)]; Universitat Jaume I: [Grant Number UJI-B2017-33].