Entering New Country and Product Markets: Does Export Promotion Help?

Entering new export markets is primarily a discrete choice. Even though several empirical papers have used modeling strategies consistent with this fact, no study has examined the effects of public policies aimed at affecting this decision within this setting. In this paper we assess the impact of trade promotion activities on export outcomes using trade support and highly disaggregated export data for the whole population of exporters of a small developing country, Uruguay, over the period 2000-2007 to estimate a binary outcome model which allows for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that trade supporting activities have helped firms reach new destination countries and introduce new differentiated products.