For a representative sample of manufacturing firms in 26 countries, this paper shows that changes in the cost of importing over time are significantly and negatively correlated with changes in the percentage of firms' material inputs that are of foreign origin. Furthermore, the paper shows that...

Although many studies consider the spatial pattern of manufacturing plants in developing countries, the role of services as a driver of urbanization and structural transformation is still not well understood. Using establishment level data from India, this paper helps narrow this gap by...

While innovation is a source of competitiveness, it may expose plants to survival risks. Using a rich set of plant-product data for Chilean manufacturing plants during the period 1996-2006 and discrete-time hazard models controlling for unobserved plant heterogeneity, this paper shows that...

This paper explores how the expansion of labor-intensive manufacturing exports resulting from the United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2001 translated into wages of skilled and unskilled workers and the skill premium in Vietnam through the channel of labor demand. In order to...

This paper decomposes manufacturing import growth rates in a selected set of large industrial and developing countries (five industrial and eight developing) and measures the relative contributions of domestic demand and market share changes for two separate periods 1991/92 - 2001/02 and 2001/02...

This paper shows that the top 1 percent of exporters critically shape trade patterns, using firm-level data from 32 countries. In particular, variation in average firm size (the intensive margin) explains over two thirds of the variation in the sector distribution of exports across countries,...

This paper evaluates the impact of foreign aid to five service sectors (transportation, information and communications technologies, energy, banking/financial services, and business services) on exports of downstream manufacturing sectors in developing countries. To address the reverse causality...

In a large cross-country sample of manufacturing establishments drawn from 188 cities, average exports per establishment are smaller for African firms than for businesses in other regions. The authors show that this is mainly because, on average, African firms face more adverse economic...