When a country exports more, is it more firms exporting or the same firms exporting more?
The Intensive Margin in Trade: How Big and How Important?
Ana M. Fernandes et al. (2023) · Journal of International Economics
Replication data ↗ (openICPSR)
The archive requires an account we do not hold, so the files were not opened. What follows rests on the published abstract and on this platform's own observations.
What the authors found
The answer decides which trade model is right and how large the gains from trade are. Krugman's benchmark puts all variation on the intensive margin — exports per firm — while Melitz with a Pareto distribution puts it all on the extensive margin, the number of firms. Using the World Bank's Exporter Dynamics Database covering firm-level exports from 50 countries, Fernandes and co-authors find it is about half and half. That implies the trade elasticity is not constant and the gains from trade differ from either benchmark.
What our data adds
This database holds the aggregate these two margins multiply out to, and nothing that could separate them. Vietnam's exports to the United States rose 187 per cent between 2017 and 2024; whether that is more Vietnamese firms exporting or the same firms shipping more is invisible here and is the entire question. The honest statement is that our bilateral totals are the left-hand side of the paper's decomposition and contain none of the right-hand side.
| Figure | Value | Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| Share of export variation on the intensive margin (paper) | ~50% | IMTS.XG_FOB_USD.A |
| Vietnam export growth to the US, 2017-2024, margins unseparated | +187% | IMTS.XG_FOB_USD.A |
Every figure here is computed from observations in this database and can be charted, downloaded or queried.
What this cannot show
Firm-level export registers are the missing shape. This platform's data model holds indicator by area by partner by period, which cannot express a distribution across firms, and no aggregation of country totals recovers one. The Exporter Dynamics Database the authors used is the kind of source that would have to be added, and it is a different shape of object from everything currently loaded.
The data behind it
Related notes
- When a country exports, how much of the value was actually made there — and how far does the usual export statistic mislead us?
- Who actually paid for the 2018 US tariffs, and what did they do to the pattern of trade?
- When two countries trade with each other and neither is the United States, whose currency is the price in?