Productivity shocks and industry specific effects on export and internationalisation: VAR approach

This study examines the industry-specific effects of productivity shocks on exports and the internationalisation of the largest Croatian exporters. In order to answer two research questions: (1) Which hypothesis, the productivity-led hypothesis or export-led hypothesis, holds in the case of the largest Croatian exporters? (2) Are the effects of productivity shocks on exports and internationalization sectoral dependent, and in what way? The authors tested 300 largest exporters’ micro- financial data for the 2006-2015 period by using a vector autoregression (VAR) method. Three productivity measures examined are total factor productivity, labour productivity and capital productivity. The results imply that productivity-led hypothesis holds for majority of Croatian largest exporters’ sectors. Rather than a specific export-led hypothesis, a bi-directional flow has proved to have greater influence on several industrial sectors, including professional and scientific services and administrative services sectors, and to a lesser extent, transport and warehousing, accommodation and food sectors. It is predominantly negative in terms of TFP and positive in terms of labour productivity (agriculture, electricity and gas supply, wholesale and transport and warehousing, and information and communication) and capital productivity (electricity and gas supply). Managerial and policy implications of productivity shocks are discussed in the paper.