Export Promotion: Heterogeneous Programs and Heterogeneous Effects

Export promotion agencies provide exporters with a broad range of services, going from counseling to sponsoring their participation in international trade missions and fairs. These services may have heterogeneous effects and thus contribute differently to achieve the goals of these organizations. Empirical evidence on their relative effectiveness is rather limited. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature. We compare the impact of different public trade promotion programs on the extensive and intensive margin of firms¿ exports, both to each other and with respect to no participation in these activities, by applying multiple treatment matching difference-in- differences on highly disaggregated export data for the whole population of Colombian exporters over the period 2003-2006. We find that the use of programs combining different services is associated with better export performance, primarily along the country-extensive margin, than their basic individual components.