Effectiveness of export promotion programmes

Export promotion policies and programmes (EPP) are increasingly popular to enhance export performance, but the evidence from their reported estimates appear puzzling and yet vary widely. We examine 1869 estimated parameters dealing with EPP and firm-level export performance from 37 studies published up to including 2020. Our main findings are threefold. First, constructing 26 moderator variables reflecting the context in which researchers obtain their estimated parameters, we uncovered that differences across the primary studies are mainly driven by the characteristics of the data, the types of firms targeted, the set of variables controlled in the underlying estimation techniques, the adopted a four-dimensional view of export performance, and the publication characteristics. Second, controlling for publication selection bias and reducing potential endogeneity issues, the implied gains from trade-promotion polices is about 0.069, suggesting a small practical impact by the existing guidelines. Third, unlike the econometric evaluation technique, we find robust evidence that the firm-extensive and destination-extensive margins appeared to be associated with mediating factors of publication bias.