Exports and firm-level efficiency in African manufacturingArne Bigsten (), Paul Collier, Stefan Dercon, Marcel Fafchamps, Bernard Gauthier (), Jan Willem Gunning, Jean Habarurema, Abena Oduro, Remco Oostendorp, Catherine Pattillo, Mans Soderbom, Francis Teal and Albert Zeufack () No 2000-16, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Abstract: In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Measures of firm-level efficiency using stochastic production frontier models are constructed for the period 1992 to 1995. We find that there are large efficiency gains from exporting both in terms of levels and growth, and contrary to China, the gains are largest for the new entrants to exporting. We control for unobserved heterogeneity using a dynamic model with correlated random effects. Results are robust and consistently, we find evidence of a learning-by-exporting effect as well as self-selection of the most efficient firms into exporting. The effect of exporting on efficiency appears to be larger in this African sample than in comparable studies of other regions which is consistent with the smaller size of domestic markets. Keywords: 2000 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2000-16 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
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