Essays on international trade and export performance.

Summary Some countries have historically developed by opening up to trade and adopting a growth strategy driven by manufacturing exports. Trade promotes the efficient allocation of resources based on comparative advantage, with imports supporting technology transfer and productivity growth, while exports play a key role in supporting balance of payments and domestic revenue mobilization efforts. By stimulating growth, trade has the potential to reduce poverty and improve people's living conditions. Using the case of Cambodia, where the textile and garment industry provides the majority of manufacturing employment and accounts for the bulk of the country's exports, Chapter 2 shows that trade openness through manufacturing exports can improve household welfare. We use the propensity score matching method to show that the textile sector improves the welfare of the poorest 40 percent of households by increasing their consumption, asset accumulation, and the share of children attending school, as well as by reducing food insecurity and the incidence and depth of poverty. The application of the instrumental variables method also indicates that remittances from migrants working in the textile sector relax the budget constraint of recipient households and increase spending on education, health, and agricultural investments that are conducive to higher productivity. Chapter 3 takes a macroeconomic approach and explores the determinants of episodes of strong and sustained export growth. It finds that institutional quality supported by macroeconomic stability, exchange rate depreciation, export diversification, participation in global value chains, and market-oriented agricultural reforms are sources of export acceleration. Increased market competition in network industries and the lifting of capital account restrictions stimulate mainly service exports, while foreign direct investment flows support accelerations in goods exports. Applying the synthetic control method to the illustrative cases of Brazil and Peru reveals that export accelerations are followed by real GDP per capita growth and declines in unemployment and income inequality. The chapter's results indicate complementarity between goods and services and suggest that lowering barriers to trade in services would also benefit trade in goods. Chapter 4 quantifies a new source of barriers to trade related to the time it takes to process imports through customs. The unpredictability of waiting times for the clearance of imported goods undermines the reliability of the supply chain and affects the export performance of firms importing intermediate goods. Using the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator, we find that the uncertainty associated with customs clearance delays for imported intermediate goods does not affect either the entry or exit rates of manufacturing firms, but does reduce the survival rates of new exporters. This effect is heterogeneous across industries, increases over time as exporters' reputations deteriorate, and appears to be driven by South-North trade, probably because buyers in developed countries are more time-sensitive. It is also mitigated by sunk costs of market entry.