No abstract

The transition into non-traditional export activities attracts important policy and academic attention. Using international trade data, we explore how alternative linkages relate to the takeoff and acceleration of export industries. Concretely, we run a horse-race among alternative Marshallian linkages across sectors: input-output relations, technology and labor. Technology has a predictive power depending on the specification used. We consistently find, however, that export takeoffs are more likely to occur in sectors that are upstream to already competitive export industries. Our findings, which are mostly driven by developing economies, are consistent with Albert Hirschman's 60-year-old view that the forces behind upstream linkages fueled the growth of new competitive industries in the developing world.

Export diversification is associated with economic growth and development. Our paper explores competing mechanisms that mediate the emergence and growth of export products based on their economic relatedness to pre-existing exports. Our innovation is to simultaneously consider supply factors like labor, sourcing and technology; as well as demand factors like industry specific customer-linkages in a global setting. We find that, while technology and workforce similarity explain emergence and growth, pre-existing downstream industries remain a robust predictor of diversification, especially for jumpstarting new exports in developing countries. Our global stylized fact generalizes Javorcik's (2004) view that spillovers are more likely in backward linkages.

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Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license. Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.