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...

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth,...

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...

El presente estudio analiza el crecimiento reciente de las exportaciones de bienes y servicios de Centroamérica (excepto México) y la República Dominicana durante la década de 2000, con vistas a explicar a qué se debe la pérdida de participación de las exportaciones regionales en el...

Virtually all Latin American and Caribbean countries have established specialized organizations to promote their exports. Existing analyses of these organizations are at best partial and fragmentary. This paper aims at overcoming these limitations of the literature by presenting a consistent,...

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...

Industrial clusters are commonly targeted to receive financial support allocated to local-based development projects. Cluster promotion is seen as an effective industrial policy tool aimed at improving productivity and employment generation. Nevertheless, despite its popularity as a regional...

This Technical Note presents a framework for food security in LAC that takes into consideration the key drivers and external factors behind food security. This framework for food security policy interventions will guide policymakers and analysts in answering the following questions: i) Which are...