Olarreaga, Sperlich, and Trachsel 4 and products, but has little impact on the intensive margins of exports in a sample of Peruvian firms. Volpe and Carballo (2010) found that smaller firms are more likely to benefit from export-promotion services in Chile. Broocks and Van Biesebroeck (2017) confirm that export promotion works mainly through the extensive margin in a sample of Belgian firms, but experienced exporters observe increases in their intensive margin. Cruz (2014) and Broocks and van Biesebroeck (2017) provide evidence of export promotion helping firms enter export markets in Brazil and Belgium, respectively. Lederman, Olarreaga, and Zavala (2016) show in a sample of Latin American firms that export promotion helps firms enter into and survive in export markets, but has little impact on the intensive margin. Van Biesebroeck, Konings, and Martincus (2016) show that export promotion has helped Belgian and Peruvian firms survive in export markets during the great recession. Cadot et al. (2015) show a positive impact of export-promotion programs in Tunisia, but it tends to be short-lived.

More recently, randomized experiments at the firm level have shown that the returns to export promotion can be large. Atkin, Khandelwal, and Osman (2017) conduct an experiment where they offer to a random set of firms the opportunity to export high-quality carpets to retailers in the United States and Europe. They found that treated firms had an increase in profits of around 20 percent and larger increases in the quality of goods they produced, which is consistent with learning-by-exporting. Breinlich et al. (2015) also conduct a controled trial by providing targeted information to a randomly selected set of firms regarding the benefits and costs of exporting. Their objective is to assess the role that information plays on the perceptions that firms have about the costs and benefits of selling in international markets. They found that treated non-exporters become less likely to export, whereas treated exporters become more likely to export, suggesting that the provision of information can have an impact on firms’ behaviour.

The advantage of the literature using firm-level data is that it can better identify the type of firm or worker that is benefiting from the program, and the channels through which export promotion affects export growth (e.g., extensive versus intensive margins). The disadvantage of microdata is that it is not clear how to aggregate results from individual firms or workers to obtain an impact on total exports or GDP. This is important, because the cases for and against export promotion are often based on externalities (positive and negative). By simply observing that firms benefiting from export promotion tend to export larger amounts than firms that do not benefit from the program, it is not possible to assess how big the aggregate impact is and not even the sign of that impact. It is potentially conceivable that badly designed export-promotion schemes will lead to a larger fall in exports of firms not benefiting from the program than the increase in exports of firms that benefit from the program. This paper takes the alternative route, which is to work with aggregate data directly. But it should be clear that these two types of analysis complement each other as they help address different questions.

Section 2 discusses the surveys of EPAs used to construct the dataset, and provides some descriptive statistics regarding budget, sources of funding, governance, and activities of EPAs. Section 3 presents the empirical strategy followed to estimate the heterogeneity in returns to export-promotion programs in terms of both exports and GDP per capita. Section 4 presents the results, and section 5 concludes.

# **2. Data Sources and Summary Statistics**

The study merged information from three rounds of EPAs’ surveys. The first survey was conducted in the fall of 2005 by the World Bank and was the base for the study in Lederman, Payton and Olarreaga (2010). The second round was conducted in the fall of 2010, also by the World Bank, and the final round was conducted in the fall of 2014 by the International Trade Center (ITC).

The initial survey contacted all EPAs in the ITC’s contact information database available on the ITC’s web page in 2005. The list was complemented with the help of World Bank country economists who provided contact information on national EPAs that were not listed in the ITC database. A total of 116 EPAs were contacted by email; 92 answered of which only 4 percent declined. In 2010, the same 116