 So thank you all for coming out so one of the cornerstones of the learning to compete program has been a careful analysis of exporting behavior of firms and That has resulted in five academic papers that Will hopefully be published in a special issue of the Journal of African Economies in due course And I thought I'd summarize a little bit about what these papers are doing I should be very clear that I have not written any of these papers I am just the editor of this special issue and indeed John Rand, Carol and Finn have Contributed to these papers. So I should certainly not take a lot of credit for this I'm very happy to take some blame if there's anything wrong with them as as as it goes So we have five countries two middle-income countries Tunisia and Vietnam and three low-income countries Mozambique Ethiopia and and Kenya So we thought this is a nice mix of countries. They Differ, of course, but they don't differ too much In the sense that, you know, it will still be informative To do some kind of comparative analysis here It was especially focusing especially on exporting Mechanisms so manufacturing is relatively large in Tunisia and Vietnam 17% Kenyan Mozambique around the average for sub-Saharan Africa 11% in Ethiopia Much much low. It's come down out 4% I'm talking now about the share of manufacturing in GDP If you look at I'm just going through sort of the macro numbers so manufacturing exports per capita That would come out at around a hundred dollars in Tunisia and and Vietnam and around four dollars in Ethiopia So there are these big differences across the the countries and so the overall goal of what we have tried to do In this part of the program is to understand better Well, first of all, why some firms exports and others don't How firms Develop after they have broken into exports market And how they grow sort of to sort of drill down on what other benefits To the individual firm from engaging with the international market And as you shall see a little later That's one of the the things that we have some some quite interesting results on And of course since we have the five countries we can also say something about On the one hand what is common what appears to be common across these countries? For example with respect to the the consequences the benefits of exporting and on the other hand In what types of mechanisms appear to be very country specific? I think that's quite interesting because then that might feed into a policy discussion in due course So we just go through through the the stylized facts. So five countries as I say Panel data are available for all of them the time dimension in these panels vary from three or four years in in I think one case to up to a decade of data for Ethiopia I believe and across all the countries the the basic stylized facts are the same so exporting firms are Larger more capital intensive tend to be much more productive pay higher wages are more modern Then non-exporting firms and that's pretty well known So then how do firms become exporters? How do we get sort of get the ball rolling? So if only 5% of the firms in a fear Ethiopia export, how can we get that number up to 10% well? That turns out to be a very difficult thing to do because breaking into exports markets very difficult And it as it seems very very costly so Just to take an example to give you a number just to illustrate orders of magnitude if you look at the Ethiopian sample Take a baseline likelihood of exporting is around 5% if you could move that firm into the export markets Exogenously the likelihood that it would continue to be in the export market would be 50% in the next period So that's kind of interesting from a policy point of view because if you can somehow move these firms into the export market So that they can adjust their organization their technology and more generally their outlook Chances are that they will stay there and There are Many good reasons why we want them to stay there I mean one reason is that of course they get access to bigger markets all these well-known Consequences that's not what we've chosen to focus on here. We've chosen to Ask the question whether they actually learn perform better as a result of interacting with foreign buyers and being present in foreign markets and It looks as though that's very much the case So if you look at learning effects by which I mean essentially productivity gains that we see evolving Sort of dynamically after entry into exporting these are very large. They're actually much larger than what previous studies have implied So using sort of modern econometric techniques Ballpark number would be around 20% So Again coming back to the Ethiopian firm that initially baseline case very unlikely to export If I can sort of move it into the export market It's very likely to stay there and it's also likely then to see its productivity grow by about 20% into your course For an ownership plays an important role in the context so firms with domestic ownership are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to their ability to enter the Export market So FDI probably is something that policy makers should embrace when there are many reasons for embracing FDI Here's another one that it actually can get the ball rolling when it comes to promoting exports in the local market There is even some evidence in one of the countries that we've looked at of Spillover effects so that the exporting decisions and the R&D decisions made by foreign firms spillover Onto the decisions and behavior of local firms. I Should stress there that there are some some country differences Certainly again coming back to Ethiopia. For example, there is very little foreign ownership So that does not seem to be a very promising Avenue for for sparing up exports at the moment and I think what we've learned more generally is that getting firms into the export markets there. There isn't like a common Recipe for doing that the exports model if you think in terms of you know Econometric model looks very different across all the five countries that we have looked at However, the consequences of exporting are very similar Across all the five countries. So there are many different ways of getting there But it looks as though what you get out of it in terms of productivity gains is actually quite similar across the countries Then the various papers have sort of chosen to pursue different sort of avenues of probing I suppose one interesting Issue that has been explored for Vietnam and Tunisia is to look at the role played by innovation in this context and Here we get into a discussion as to how does this learning happen? Is it sort of does it happen automatically in the form of passive learning or do the firms have to actually engage in other Parallel activities in order to reap the benefits from exporting and There are some signs that if you simultaneously engage in R&D for example, or if you hire engineers and and sort of move quite deliberately to a more sophisticated Process and and type of product then the gains from exporting tend to be higher. I will only need one I think So I'm gonna Sum up just to give you since I don't have slides. I'll give you three three bullet points So big differences between exporters and non exporters across the countries The driving factors of exports Differ a lot across countries. So Policy makers who are interested in the question. How do I get firms into the exports market should probably base? You know, they are thinking on country specific analysis But as I say a common result across all the countries is that the exporting results in productivity gains Those gains are also somewhat heterogeneous. They can be particularly strong for example in one of the country We find that it is small firms in particular that Make strong productivity gains as a result of getting into the export market. So Bottom line the old truth seems to hold Promoting exports is a pretty sound development policy. It seems But I'm sure we'll come back to that issue and discuss it more a little later. Thank you