 Okay, so hi everybody. My name is Alan. I come from the University of Lausanne and this paper is a joint work with IGC Marguerite Poncelle who is here Melisio from the World Bank, Oliva Cado, my actual Thesis Director and Nicola Berman from the Graduate Institute and we're making an analysis on how exporters are just to exchange specifications. So we have some new evidence from the East African community. So the main idea is what are the key policy issues in East Africa, Eastern African community? So we have two sites. One is the trade integration one, which you have custom unions, some attempts to cooperate in building a common market though. We have also some reductions and NTBs, some mutual recognition agreements in some services, for example. And on the other hand, we have monetary integration, which is basically we're trying to look for arguments to see whether we have, it's ideal to have a monetary union or not. So our strategy will be to to infear how exporters adapt to exchange rate fluctuations, which is a whole literature on what is called exchange rate pass rule. We come back to that afterwards and after that we're gonna see also a little bit of what is the real cost of exchange variety on trade. So our strategy basically will be to to affirm the the extent of market power. So the lack of market integration in the ESE with this strategy. So the first question to answer is whether these monetary unions are good or not. So we have some monetary unions like with like fixed exchange rate cost that are vulnerable to asymmetric shocks. We have lack of market integration that raises the probability of asymmetric shocks. So market integration and monetary integration are strictly linked. We also have, for instance, as an example, all expectations in some ESE members, for example in Uganda, which is raising a lot. But that that will be a major asymmetric shock and so far there's no actual evidence that is that there's more growth within a monetary union with a monetary union than in other custom like custom unions. So the the basic thing is that we know that exchange policies kick to export growth. We have this example from a paper from Fran and Petola who showed that surges are preceded by a large depreciation of the real exchange rate and lower exchange rate volatility. It actually just allowed the exporters to be more competitive. And on the other hand, there's a very huge result in the literature which is on the what is called the exchange rate disconnect is that we don't have any evidence of prices in the consuming countries to to react to any macroeconomic barriers. And as export and exchange rate is important, we also have that there's a very important issue on small manufacturers which is kind of the the main idea we're looking for here in this paper. So we know that, for example, in the East African community, it's extremely concentrated. For example, close to 60% of EAC exporters realize over 95% of their export turnover on regional markets. But at the same time, these are the smaller countries, the smaller firms. So you can see, for example, here in figure three, the share of regional sales in export across export turnover distribution. It's you see the link between the two. So what we're going to do first I'm going to explain quickly what it's been done on the literature before. So the first thing is to what they do is that they have the price in the consumer country. This is LNPC on the upper hand. And they look for the for the effect of this of the exchange rate in the consumer country, which is called ERPT, the exchange rate pass-through. But what we're going to do is that we're going to look on the other side, which is the which is the producing countryside. So we're going to estimate this beta P, which is the the reaction of the real exchange rate fluctuation on the unit prices of them in the in the producing countries. So for making it clear, what are you going to try to infer is that as we have this pricing to market, this is a proof of imperfect competition in the countries. So just to make it clear, if you have some incomplete pass-through, which is basically that the the price is not changing within the the real exchange rate, we're going to have a proof that is actual imperfect competition. So we have some literature. The first one is on print style that shows that for example, if the exchange rate doubles, say for, I don't know, 0.7 euros per dollar to 1.4, we have the US consumer price that goes down only by 30%. That's the and it's a very common result. We have some results from Maston, for example, where the pricing to market is extremely, it's 0.5, 0.9 and and it's also variable across sectors. So the basic thing is that we have incomplete exchange rate pass-through. So we have pricing to market and this is taking an evidence of variable markups, which means basically imperfect competition and market segmentation and so on. So on the other hand, these were country level estimates from the from on the other hand with all these new customs data that we have on the on the developing country and on developed countries. We have some firm level estimates that show roughly around 0.1% of 0.9% of pricing to market and we have some example for Berman et al who did it for France, Fossi who did it for Denmark and Chatterjee et al who did it for Brazil. So we have more pricing to market for large firms. These are the basic results. More pricing to market for core products and more pricing to market for more productive firms. So the basic comparative statistics we're going to analyze is that basic standard models of trade standard models as in Berman and Chatterjee. So we have on the one side we have prices. We have more productive firms that price more to market. We have also more pricing to market in destinations with higher distribution costs. We have less pricing to market in far away destinations and we have less pricing to marketing destinations where competition is tougher. I'm going to explain a little bit more afterwards. Then we have volumes. We have more productive firms that have lower volume elasticity. We have lower volume elasticity in destinations with higher distribution costs, higher volume elasticity for far away destinations and higher volume elasticity in destinations where competition is tougher too. So here's some basic notation. We have bilateral decent which is taken as a proxy of trade costs. We have also destination GDP approximated in the competition. We have the number of products which is approximated in the firm productivity. We have a dummy variable that says whether a good is manufactured or not. And we control by fixed effects within our for origin year for firm private destination and of course the main variable which is the real exchange rate. And our dependent variable which is the unit price of a firm, of a product P to a destination in a particular time. So this is our baseline estimation. We have the log of the unit price and then we have also all the regressors and we're going to focus on these pricing to market coefficient which is this alpha which is the beta we were talking about before. So we have some estimation issues, exchange rate, exogenous pricing, that's, I mean, we don't have any indigeneity bias there. But and that's maybe the difference between our paper and the ones from the developed countries in which you have other data sets from service that allows to have some more information on the firms. Here we only have the customs, the customs, the customs information, but it's, I mean, the good thing is that we have multiple countries, they only had one country. So that's basically what we're going to do. So we proxy the, for example, with the lag number of products, but it's not terrible powerful. And we also define the number of products at firm level and not a non-firm product definition, but it's also, it's not very strong though. And this is our data set. So it's very rich. We have six different countries. Bangladesh, Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania and Uganda and Rwanda. The good thing is that we have a very large sample. As you can see, we have almost more than one million observations. The bad is that we don't, we don't, we don't have any firm level covariate except from, except from the ones constructed from our database. And the, the ugly, we have very, very noisy data. We have a lot of mistakes, many errors in the measures for the volumes, for the prices and but we have to, we, we clean the, the data sets, eliminate it outliers and stuff like that. So these are the baseline results. So this is for the whole sample. And what we're going to focus on is that, so we have the same, we have the same, yeah. We have basically the same, the same results as in the previous literature with 0.1 in the, without any aggressors. And we also, I mean, we, we, we try to redo what the literature has done. So for example, regarding the some, some of the interaction turns between the real exchange rate and some counter-valuables, we have the expected, the expected results. And the most important thing is that we find this little result with the dummy that it's for the, for trade between the, within the Eastern African community, which is a dummy, whether it's a bilateral trade or not within the, within the, within the East African community. And we find that there's more pricing to market in the Eastern African community, which means basically that there is a, a proof that there's imperfect competition within the market. Here we, I present the, the results of the voluminous ticities. There are a little bit more complicated to interpret, because for instance, these coefficients, when you get the holder aggressors, shouldn't be that big. This implies very large elasticity of substitutions. But, I mean, we, we, we basically focus on the, on the part of the, on the prices. So, here we're going to see only for the EXC exporters, and we see a result in which we have non-pricing to market for, for, when we include all the aggressors. But for the particular EAC bilateral trade, we do find more pricing to market, which is a proof, again, that we have imperfect competition within the, within the Eastern African community. So, summing up the results. So, we have a pricing to market coefficient around 0.1 without all the interaction terms. We have the voluminous ticities that are not very easy to interpret, because they imply very large elasticity of substitution. We have, and for the EXC exporters, which is our main focus, is that in general we don't have pricing to market. So, we, so, this implies that there's no market power. But at the same time, when we take only the EAC sample, we have very strong pricing to market. So, this is suggesting substantial market power. Now, besides the pricing to market analysis that we do, we also make some, some analysis on the effects of volatility, of exchange rate volatility on the, on the entry and exit of the firms. And basically, we found that it doesn't matter that much whether we have higher volatility or less for exports, which is kind of counterintuitive, but it's what we found. So, basically, for summing up the conclusions, we have pricing to market behavior of exporters, just strong evidence of market power in the EAC markets. So, the markets are still segmented. We have a lot of tariffs, and it's difficult to arbitrage between this infant industry protection and need to discipline abuses of market power. On the other hand, in the entry-exit analysis, we have, we have results that don't provide any strong evidence that it's actually important to have a customs monetary union. We have exit rates that go down with exchange rate rate volatility. We have exit rates not higher for credit-constrained firms. Maybe I didn't explain that. We have this financial dependence measure, which basically says if a firm depends a lot on credit or not, and we don't have any strong evidence on that. So, the policy is implications that we have to focus on portion regional trade integration because we have a lot of market power within the EAC, and we're still looking for compelling cases of a launch process to monitor integration. So, that's there. Thank you very much.