Economies d'agglomération à l'exportation et difficulté d'accès aux marchés

The empirical literature in international trade emphasizes the existence of export spillovers. The agglomeration of local exporters is found to have a positive impact on the probability that other neighbouring firms start exporting. In this paper we go further into this question and investigate the heterogeneity of this effect depending on firms’ characteristics and on different indicators measuring the accessibility of destination countries (time and number of documents necessary to export to the country, weighted demand and riskiness). Our results show that an increase in the number of neighboring exporters has a greater impact on the probability that a firm starts exporting when the targeted country is riskier, is characterised by a lower weighted demand and imposes numerous and costly administrative formalities for foreign exporters.