Export Promotion: Bundled Services Work Better

Export promotion agencies provide exporters with a broad range of services, going from counselling to sponsoring their participation in international trade missions and fairs. These services may have heterogeneous effects and thus contribute differently to achieve the goals of these organisations. Empirical evidence on their relative effectiveness is rather limited. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature. We compare the impact of different public trade promotion programmes on the extensive and intensive margin of firms' exports, both to each other and with respect to no participation in these activities, by applying multiple treatment matching difference-in-differences on highly disaggregated export data for the whole population of Colombian exporters over the period 2003–06. We find that use of programmes that combine different services is associated with better export performance than their basic individual components, primarily along the country-extensive margin.