Finance and Export Survival : The Case of MENA Region and Sub-Saharan Africa

The paper looks at unique firm-product-destination export data collected by custom authorities in four countries from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) - Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Yemen as well as in six countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) - Ghana, Mali, Malawi, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda. We use these data to examine to impact of financial development on the long-term success of exports from developing countries. We find that those agricultural exports that face particularly costly implementation of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) are also the ones that disproportionately benefit from a higher level of domestic financial development. This result confirms the previous findings from a smaller SSA sample (Jaud et al. 2015). It is robust to controlling for heterogeneity at the firm, product, and country level as well as for alternative channels that could shape the relation between finance and international trade in the data