and traders of traditional exportable food products, such as spices, tea, coffee, honey, etcetera, to organize small-scale food exhibitions that could help building a trademark for domestic products, and promote them internationally through the tourism channel.

Given that tourism acts as an export promotion channel, it is of foremost importance to strengthen quality standards, and product certification systems domestically. While efforts have been made to improve product certification processes, in particular in export markets, it is important that these processes are also implemented domestically. For example, the ‘Chyangra Pashmina’ logo introduced by the Association of Pashmina Exporters of Nepal is used only by Nepal’s exporters. However, if tourist consumption of products in Nepal also promotes exports, building the brand domestically can also help to build it internationally. This is especially relevant for food products, where sanitary concerns are likely to be a binding constraint for tourist experimentation of domestic products. In the case of honey, for example, the implementation of a traceability system for honey farmers, along with the provision of clear guidelines to comply with internationally-acceptable production processes, and the availability of labs at local levels for monitoring residuals could provide a boost to the sector, increasing demand both within and beyond borders.

Finally, it is important to point to the limitations of this analysis as well as to lines of further research. First, given the lack of long series of firm-level data on exports by product and by destination, it is not possible to actually test the differential effects of tourist inflows by destination on export growth at the extensive and intensive margins. As these databases become increasingly available, it would be valuable to understand the importance of the tourism channel in decreasing entry costs into export markets, thus boosting firm entry and diversification along the product and market dimensions, by modeling both entry into export markets and levels of exports given entry. Second, in this paper focusing on the case of Nepal, the identification of ‘niche’ or ‘cultural’ goods relied on the criteria of Nepal’s Trade Integration Strategy, designed by the government. However, alternative methods to choose the ‘niche’ or ‘cultural’ goods as well as the goods to be considered as controls could be introduced to check the robustness of the results. Finally, more disaggregated tourist-related data, such as length of stay and tourist expenditure per-day by origin of the tourist would better inform tourism promotion agencies on where to allocate resources that are scarce.

# **References**

Cattaneo, O. (2009), “Tourism as a Strategy to Diversify Exports: lessons from Mauritius.” In Breaking Into New Markets: Emerging Lessons for Export Diversification, ed. Richard Newfarmer, William Shaw, and Peter Walkenhorst, pp. 183-195.

Chambers, V. and E. Angell (1998), “Passion for Pashmina: The Fabric that makes cashmere feel like cardboard”, Newsweek, Vol. 131 (19) p. 70.

Durbarry, R. (2004), “Tourism and economic growth: the case of Mauritius”, Tourism Economics, Vol. 10 (4), pp. 389-401.

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