Gourdon, Marchat, Sharma, and Vishwanath (2011) apply the same type of quasi-experimental methods to the evaluation of FAMEX, a World Bank-supported export promotion program in Tunisia, which provided a mixture of counseling and matching grants to new exporters. The study exploits a customized firm-level survey to estimate the effects of FAMEX on the export performance of beneficiary firms at the intensive and extensive margins. Propensity-score matching DID estimates suggest a very large and statistically significant growth effect at the intensive margin: a 39% differential in terms of annual export growth compared to control firms over the 2004-2008 period. The treatment effect at the extensive margin – in terms of products and destinations – is both smaller quantitatively (a 5% growth differential in the count of products and destinations for program beneficiaries compared to control firms) and of marginal or no significance (at 10% confidence level for destinations and insignificant for products). In addition to the observed acceleration in export growth, Gourdon et al. find a significant boost to employment growth: a 10% annual differential for program beneficiaries, significant at the 5% confidence level. An original feature of their dataset is that it covers service firms in addition to manufacturing firms, and they find considerably stronger effects for the former. One potential issue with their data is that the survey was conducted ex-post (no baseline survey was conducted as IE was not part of the program design) so the data may suffer from recall bias. Preliminary results in Cadot, Fernandes, Gourdon, and Mattoo (2011) based on an alternative source of data (customs data) suggest a smaller and non-persistent treatment effect.

Jaud and Cadot (2011) also apply quasi-experimental methods to assess the impact of the E.U.funded pesticides initiative program (PIP) on the export performance of firms in Senegal's horticulture sector. Their results suggest that, while the program had no significant effect on exports of fresh fruit and vegetable pooled over all products and destinations, it had a positive effect when considering exports to the EU.

Other quasi-experimental methods can address selection bias in the evaluation of the impact of a program. One approach relies on instrumental variable (IV) estimation. This can be used when program take-up is less than complete and thought to be correlated with unobserved individual characteristics influencing performance. In this case, eligibility can be used as an instrument for participation, provided that eligibility is truly exogenous (e.g., if there is randomization of eligibility but program take-up is incomplete or some participants drop out). This method is used in the context of non-targeted interventions by Sequeira (2011), as described in section 4.2.

Another approach is regression discontinuity design (RDD), which makes use of breaks in eligibility to identify a program’s impact.<sup>33</sup> For instance, suppose that an export promotion program targets small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as defined by a cutoff level of sales. If the sample is large enough, one can compare outcomes for SMEs immediately below the

> 33 See Campbell (1969) for details and a survey can be found in Todd (2008).

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