really increase from 1995 to 2009, the number of firms in the census approximately tripled, while the fraction of exporters remained constant. As a result, the absolute number of manufacturing exporters increased from 24 to 78. But even that last number is proportionately smaller than for Rwanda, given that at the time the Ethiopian economy was approximately eight times larger.

# **4.3 Smaller exporters are only important in manufacturing**

After an overview of GVC integration for the entire manufacturing sector, the number of exporters, and the evolution of total trade, Table 1 provides evidence how this aggregate breaks down by destination and firm size along a variety of dimensions. First, and most importantly, for each of the three sectors it shows the top 5 export destinations. Second, by comparing the results over time we learn about the evolution of global integration. Third, the shading in the table indicates how much difference it makes when we include small exporters. Darker colors indicate greater importance of small firms. Fourth, cells are given a black border if the rank of an export destination depends on the inclusion or exclusion of small exporters in the total.

We first discuss the relatively low importance of small exporters. The totals in Table 1 include every firm that exports at least 1,000 USD annually, combined over all its exports destinations.<sup>9</sup> The threshold to be labelled a small or large exporter is 1 million USD. When a cell in Table 1 is not colored, it indicates that bilateral trade would be less than 1% higher if small exporters are included in the total for the cell. Given the earlier figures, it is no great surprise to learn that including sales from smaller exporters makes no difference at all for the mining sector. There are only 3 of the 50 year-destination pairs where the aggregate increases by more than 1% if firms exporting less than 1 million USD per year are included, and even in these few cases the aggregate is raised by less than 5%. No single cell has a black border, indicating that including small exporters never changes the ranking of a destination.

For agriculture exporters, more cells are colored, but even here the changes are remarkably small when we include small exporters limited. Note that we use a very high threshold to distinguish small and large exporters. To be classified as a large exporter a firms need to export a not insignificant fraction of total Rwandan exports, which limits the number of large exporters to only 13 in 2008 (for all sectors) and to 30 firms in 2016. Clearly, it would be difficult for smaller exporters to change the aggregate for the top-ranked destination that generally receives 30 to 70% of all exports, but even exports to the fourth and fifth destinations are only lightly affected. Given that many of the top-5 destinations for agriculture and mining are developed countries, they might simply be out of reach for smaller firms. We discussed this at greater length in the next section.

One notable pattern is that in the second half of the sample period, the importance of smaller exporters in the agriculture sector increased. In the last four years there are few blank cells and even six instances where the aggregate changes by 5% (in two cases even more than 20%) if small exporters are included.

> 9 Note that we now use a lower export threshold than in the previous figures as explained earlier.

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