“Export Performances and Export Learning in the Tunisian manufacturing Industry: Evidence from Firm Panel Data”

As demonstrated in recent empirical litterature on firms’export performances, the international market for goods acts as a screen that selects firms access according to both internal and external factors influencing their productivity. This paper focuses particularly on production costs as a key factor that differenciates non exporting from exporting firms. In a first stage, a general framework is proposed to introduce basic conditions favouring foreign markets access. Average production cost is then taken as a key variable that explains firm’s behaviour with regard to export markets access both for non exporting and differing exporting profiles (exporters, entrants, quitters and switchers). In a second stage, the paper adresses the issue of learning through exporting assumed to reinforce firm’s competiveness. This issue is explored using two approches: the first one is based on probit and conditional maximum likelohood estimates explaining the relationship between export decision conditional to production factor costs and spillovers contribution generated by exporting activity and foreign direct investments in the local economy. After showing that only exporting activity could be a source of spillovers, a structural component of spillovers absorption is then introduced through the representation of a learning process linking average cost decrease to cumulative export volumes and earlier export markets participation. Using the Arellano and Bond technique, we find that firm’s access to export markets relies significantly on past realisations of average costs and insignificantly on learning export process. These results are confirmed for Tunisia using manufacturing micro panel data covering the period 1997 -2001.