ˆ ˆ where _FMA and SA_ are estimates of _FMA and SA_ respectively.

Because our data come from multiple locations or cities within each country we define supplier access both at the country and the city levels for estimation purposes. Foreign market access is also measured at the city rather than the national level.

# **3. Data**

Our main data source is a series manufacturing business surveys carried out mostly by the World Bank in 10 African and 8 non-African countries.<sup>9</sup> The surveys took place at various points over the years 1994 to 2003, and are all based on very similar instruments and sample designs.<sup>10</sup> Typically, each country survey generated information on production and exporting statistics on each business for a period of 2 to 3 years. The number of data points analyzed is therefore larger than a mere count of the establishments covered might suggest. The total number of manufacturing establishments covered in all the 18 countries is 14097. These were drawn from 10 industries (Table 1) and 188 cities and towns and are distributed by country as shown in Table 2. Of 188 cities covered by the surveys, 61 are from African countries.

All countries in Africa on which establishment level survey data are available on exporting activities and key firm level controls are included in our dataset. And the only criterion use in the selection of the 8 non-African countries in the set was availability of comparable data on the same set of variables. Other studies of firm performance and international trade based wholly or partially on the dataset include, Bigsten et al. (1999), Dollar el al (2004), Mengistae and Pattillo (2004), Eifert et al. (2005), and Clarke (2005).<sup>11</sup> Each country survey dataset included 2 to 3 years of observations on each establishment covering employment, sales, assets, ownership share, investment, and exporting activities. The key variables of interest to us are establishment level exports, the determination of which we would like to investigate here while controlling for key business characteristics, namely, business scale as measured by employment, business age, and whether or not there is foreign investment in the business. Exact definitions of these four variables are provided in Table 1 along with full-sample descriptive statistics.

One aspect of Africa’s smaller share in global trade in manufactures is that the fraction of manufacturers that participate in export markets is smaller in the region. The other is that Africa’s average export sales per exporter are smaller. These patterns can both be seen in Table 2. For example, the proportions of exporters in the Bangladesh and Moroccan samples are 34 percent and 40 percent respectively. The only country for which we have

> 9 The exceptions are the 1997 Ghana survey and the 1996 Tanzania survey carried out by the Centre for the Study of African Economies of the University of Oxford.

> 10 The surveys of the mid to late 1990s were implemented under the World Bank’s Regional Enterprise Development Program for Africa. The more recent surveys were carried out as part of the  Investment Climate Surveys  of the Bank’s Private Sector Development and Development Economics departments.

> 11 This is a subset of a much longer list of papers investigating a wide range of issues but  using part or all of the survey dataset used  here.

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