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Export Diversification: What's behind the Hump?

Olivier Cadot1,2; Céline Carrère3; Vanessa Strauss-Kahn

1 Center for Economic and Policy Research · 2 Centre Pour La Recherche Economique et ses Applications · 3 Université Clermont Auvergne

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2011 open access

The paper explores the evolution of export diversification patterns along the economic development path. Using a large database with 156 countries over 19 years at the HS6 level of disaggregation (4,991 product lines), we look for action at the intensive and extensive margins. We find a hump-shaped pattern of export diversification similar to what Imbs and Wacziarg (2003) found for production. Diversification and subsequent reconcentration take place mostly along the extensive margin. This hump-shaped pattern is consistent with the conjecture that countries travel across diversification cones, as discussed in Schott (2003, 2004) and Xiang (2007).

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00078
Volume
93 (2)
Pages
590-605
Language
en
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