Productivity and the export market: A firm-level analysis

An empirical model is developed to distinguish the roles of resource-level differences from productivity differences in explaining output differences between exporters and non-exporters of Taiwanese electronic products. Our results indicate that the larger size of exporters relative to non-exporters explains the bulk of the difference in output between the two groups of producers. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in productivity levels between exporters and non-exporters in three out of the four products examined. The contribution of these differences to output differences between the two groups of producers vary from 3 to 20%, depending on the electronic product and model specification.