# **_2. Data_**

We use new exporter-level data from customs for 11 countries in the LAC region, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru covering the 2000s. These data are part of the new _Exporter Dynamics Database_ presented in Cebeci, Fernandes, Freund, and Pierola (2012). The starting point for the construction of the database is raw exporter-level customs datasets generally obtained from national customs agencies, and the data cover the universe of transactions in each country. Each country dataset provides information at the exporter-productdestination-year level based on six variables: country of origin, exporting firm identifier, country of destination, product, export value, and year.<sup>7</sup> The raw exporter-level datasets were subjected to uniform reformatting and to a series of cleaning procedures. A few key aspects are discussed below by highlighting the specificities of LAC countries, but further details are provided in Cebeci, Fernandes, Freund, and Pierola (2012).

Firms were identified by their actual names, their tax identification number, or artificial unique codes randomly created by the local customs agency. These codes allow us to follow firms over time and create a panel for each country.<sup>8</sup> Regarding the destination country, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru use a special trade regime whereby firms’ sales to their free zones/customs warehouses are recorded by customs as exports, but we exclude this type of transaction from those countries’ datasets.<sup>9</sup> Regarding product nomenclatures, we use a timeconsistent ‘consolidated’ Harmonized System (HS) classification at the 6-digit level that concords and harmonizes product codes across the HS 1996, 2002, and 2007 versions (used in the raw exporter-level datasets).<sup>10</sup> Export values are measured in US dollars (USD) converted from local currency when necessary using official exchange rates from the IMF’s _International Financial Statistics_ . Export values for all LAC countries are Freight on Board (FOB) figures

> 7 For some countries, namely Brazil, Egypt, Estonia, Laos, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, the indicators were calculated without having permanent access to the customs data at the exporter-product-destination-year level. 8 The firm coding system was changed in Mexico in 2007, thus it is not possible to calculate exporter dynamics indicators such as exporter entry rates in 2007 for Mexico.

> 9 The “special trade system” refers to the recording of transactions where the goods enter or exit the domestic territory in free circulation (customs warehouses, free zones and goods under contract for inward or outward processing). In contrast, the “general trade system” refers to the recording of all other transactions of goods passing the border in their trade statistics, except for transit, trans-shipment and temporary admission transactions (see p. 32 of United Nations, 2008). The exclusion of special trade regime transactions has a minor effect on total exports in those countries given that sales to free zones/customs warehouses are generally negligible.

> 10 See Cebeci (2012) for the details on this consolidation. A list of the unique 4767 consolidated codes and concordances are available at http://econ.worldbank.org/exporter-dynamics-database.

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