How effective are export promotion activities in developing countries? What are the channels through which export promotion affects firms' exports, the intensive margin or the extensive margin? Empirical evidence in this respect is scarce. We aim at filling this gap in the literature by...

Export promotion agencies provide exporters with a broad range of services, going from counseling to sponsoring their participation in international trade missions and fairs. These services may have heterogeneous effects and thus contribute differently to achieve the goals of these...

Do all exporters benefit the same from export promotion programs? Surprisingly, not matter how obvious this question may a priori be when thinking of the effectiveness of these programs there is virtually no empirical evidence on how they affect export performance in different parts of the...

Information problems involved in trading differentiated goods are a priori acuter than those associated with trading more homogeneous products. The impact of export promotion activities intending to address these problems can be therefore expected to differ across goods with different degree of...

Entering new export markets is primarily a discrete choice. Even though several empirical papers have used modeling strategies consistent with this fact, no study has examined the effects of public policies aimed at affecting this decision within this setting. In this paper we assess the impact...

The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the...

Public-private collaboration in productive development policy in Costa Rica frequently takes the form of policy co-governance: an autonomous institution in charge of policy for a particular economic sector is created, with a board of directors comprising representatives from both the public and...

This paper studies the proposition that capital inflows tend to take the form of FDI -i.e., the share of FDI in total liabilities tends to be higher- in countries that are safer, more promising and with better institutions and policies. It finds that this view is patently wrong since it stands...

The decade of the 1990s has witnessed a wave of regional integration initiatives in Latin America: more than 14 agreements -free trade areas or customs unions- since 1990 with a handful more in varying degrees of negotiation (see Table 1). However, this was not just a Latin American phenomenon,...

It has been common to attribute financial crises to short-term capital inflows, while foreign direct investment (FDI) is seen as a safer form of finance. The relationship between crises and the composition of capital flows is particularly relevant at present because the flow of capital to Latin...