CID Graduate Student Lunch Seminar
"Decomposing World Export Growth and the Relevance of New Destinations"
Speaker: Andres Zahler, CID Doctoral Fellow and Doctoral Candidate, Public Policy, KSG
Friday, 2
November 2007
12:00 - 1:00 PM, Lunch served
Perkins Room, 4th Floor,
Rubenstein
Building, KSG
Andres Zahler is a Doctoral Candidate in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, a Doctoral Fellow at the Center for International Development, and a Research Assistant to CID Director and Professor Ricardo Hausmann. His primary research interests concern the ways in which firms innovate, their determinants and their effect in enhancing productivity and ultimately growth in the long run. His interests also lie in the role that public policy and different institutional arrangements can have in successfully overcoming the serious information and coordination failures that arise with innovation, particularly in the private sector.
Looking to understand what drives countries' export growth in practice, I provide a decomposition of world export growth at the product variety level between new destinations, new products, and growth in value of old varieties. New destinations play a significant role, accounting for 37 percent of the growth in developing countries. By comparison, entry into new product categories - a margin that has received considerable attention - explains just 7 percent of export growth. Exploring the nature of destination expansion reveals it is neither automatic nor permanent. Even relatievly competitive sectors face difficulties penetrating new destinations, and these difficulties are negatively correlated with population size and GDP per capita. Consistent with pervasive experimentation and failure, more than a third of all products in new destinations exported only once to a destination in the sixteen years studied.
Zahler, Andres. "Decomposing World Export Growth and the Relevance of New Destinations," CID Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellow Working Paper No. 20, August 2007.
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© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Last revised
02/20/2008