Notes

^1.

A significant positive effect of exporting on a firm's productivity growth has been found for countries such as, Canada, Italy, Slovenia and sub-Saharan African countries. However, the opposite has been reported for countries such as Chile, China, Germany, and Mexico. Baldwin and Yan (2012) have explored the possible explanations for the cross-country variations. See Wagner (2007), López (2005), and Greenaway and Kneller (2007) for a survey of the literature.

^2.

According to a 1974 survey that collected export data for all plants, only 0.4% of plants that filled in the short-form questionnaires reported exports (Baldwin and Gu 2003). Therefore, the excluded plants are mainly small plants, accounting for a very small proportion of total industry output. Special edits to the file post 2000 were also made because of changes that turned the ASM from a census to a survey. These changes required the exclusion of some observations that had been imputed from tax records.

^3.

See Baldwin and Rafiquzzaman (1994) for a discussion of the methodology used to create these groupings following the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1987.

^4.

In other words, only continuing exporters and non-exporters during the first sub-periods are included in the analysis. Plants that export at both the beginning (1990 and 2000) and the end (1993 and 2003) of the first sub-periods are classified as exporters; plants that do not export at either the beginning or the end of the first sub-periods are classified as non-exporters.

^5.

For full regression results, see Appendix Table 11.

^6.

See Picot and Wannell (1997).

^7.

Where it was appropriate, the relatedness of the categories was tested and confirmed with Cronbach's alpha.

^8.

The relatedness of the categories was tested and confirmed using Cronbach's alpha.

^9.

Kaiser (1958) argues that the number of principal components should be selected by retaining components with associated eigenvalues greater than the average eigenvalue.