As a proxy for ...nancing needs of agri-food products, a measure of sanitary risk is computed at the 8-digit level of the HS classi...cation (Jaud et al., 2009a). The Sanitary Risk Index (SRI) re‡ects the propensity of products to fail health and safety controls on the European Union (EU) market. Thus, it captures the need for investments to comply with the EU food safety requirements. Several studies in the standard and trade literature suggest high costs of compliance, both variable and ...xed, for ...rms exporting high-value food products (Garcia-Martinez and Poole, 2006; Maskus et al., 2005). Our proxy captures the need for ...nancing associated with exporting to stringent developed countries market. Since our focus is on African ...rms’ability to sustain in the export markets, capturing the di¤erentiated e¤ect of ...nancial development requires an export based measure rather than production based measure.

The paper contributes to three strands of literature. First, it contributes to a literature on credit constraints and patterns of trade. This rapidly growing line of research highlights the role of ...nance for credit constrained ...rms to fund both short term and longer term needs. A number of papers have provided evidence on the positive e¤ect of the supply of external ...nance to ...rms on trade performances (Manova, 2008; Beck, 2003; Svaleryd and Vlachos 2005; Berman and Hericourt forth, Bugamelli et al. 2008; Görg and Spaliara 2009). More recently, several papers have looked into the e¤ects of liquidity shortages following banking crisis on the performances of ...rms already engaged in exporting (Amiti and Weinstein, 2010; Bricogne et al., 2010). Crucially, the negative e¤ects of credit constraints vary with the industry dependence on external ...nance (Rajan and Zingales, 1998). Finance helps especially exports of those ...rms with needs for greater external capital. An innovation of our paper with respect to the previous related literature is its reliance on the index of sanitary risk to capture the need for ...- nancing of agri-food ...rms to support their exports to high income destination markets. Additionally, we address the issue of export survival. The existing literature on ...nance and trade usually focuses on the short-term year-to-year changes in the export status of products or ...rms (Manova 2008, Berman and Héricourt forth). An exception is the recent paper of Jaud et al. (2009b), who show that ...nancial development promotes export survival for ...nancially vulnerable industries requiring a higher external ...nancing to maintain their operations. Relying on the tools of survival analysis arguably enables us to better capture the medium and long run survival of exporters. This distinction is not innocuous. The majority of export relationships die within two years and the bulk of export growth in successful developing countries comes from the long-term survivors. Second, it contributes to the burgeoning trade literature using survival analysis (Besedes and Prusa 2006a, 2006b; Nitsch, 2009; Brenton et al., 2009). The literature has so far examined how di¤erent country characteristics contribute to longer survival of domestic ...rms on foreign markets. The main problems of using country characteristics as regressors are the potential endogeneity and omitted variables bias. When trying to identify the causal e¤ect of ...nancial development, it is impossible to control for all other country characteristics that are correlated with ...nance and also might a¤ect the survival 3