TY  - BOOK
AU  - Easterly,William
AU  - Easterly,William
AU  - Reshef,Ariell
AU  - Schwenkenberg,Julia
TI  - The Power of Exports
PY  - 2009///
CY  - Washington, D.C.
PB  - The World Bank
KW  - Absolute advantage
KW  - Access to Markets
KW  - Airports and Air Services
KW  - Brand
KW  - Capital markets
KW  - Economic Theory and Research
KW  - Exports
KW  - Externality
KW  - Free markets
KW  - GDP
KW  - GDP per capita
KW  - International Economics & Trade
KW  - International Trade
KW  - Law and Development
KW  - Macroeconomics and Economic Growth
KW  - Market failure
KW  - Market penetration
KW  - Marketing
KW  - Markets and Market Access
KW  - Price index
KW  - Price level
KW  - Productivity
KW  - Purchasing
KW  - Sales
KW  - Substitution
KW  - Tax Law
KW  - Total factor productivity
KW  - Transport
KW  - Wealth
N2  - The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits" which account for most of the export value and where the "hit" includes both finding the right product and finding the right market. Higher export volumes are associated with higher degrees of concentration, after controlling for the number of destinations a country penetrates. This further highlights the importance of big hits. The distribution of exports closely follows a power law, especially in the upper tail. These findings do not support a "picking winners" policy for export development; the power law characterization implies that the chance of picking a winner diminishes exponentially with the degree of success. Moreover, given the size of the economy, developing countries are more exposed to demand shocks than rich ones, which further lowers the benefits from trying to pick winners
UR  - http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-5081
ER  -