TY - JOUR AU - Easterly,William AU - Reshef,Ariell TI - African Export Successes: Surprises, Stylized Facts, and Explanations JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16597 PY - 2010 Y2 - December 2010 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16597 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16597.pdf N1 - Author contact info: William Easterly New York University Department of Economics 19 W. 4th Street, 6th floor New York NY 10012 Tel: 212/992-8684 Fax: 212/995-4186 E-Mail: william.easterly@nyu.edu Ariell Reshef University of Virginia Department of Economics P.O. Box 400182 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4182 Tel: 434-243-4977 Fax: 434-982-2904 E-Mail: ariellr@virginia.edu M3 - presented at "African Development Successes Conference", July 18-20, 2010 AB - We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil and minerals) and other commodities. Moreover, African Big Hits exhibit similar patterns as Big Hits in non-African countries. We also discuss some concerns about data quality. These stylized facts are inconsistent with the traditional view that sees African exports as a passive commodity endowment, where changes are driven mostly by global commodity prices. In order to better understand the determinants of export success in Africa we interviewed several exporting entrepreneurs, government officials and NGOs. Some of the determinants that we document are conventional: moving up the quality ladder, utilizing strong comparative advantage, trade liberalization, investment in technological upgrades, foreign ownership, ethnic networks, and personal foreign experience of the entrepreneur. Other successes are triggered by idiosyncratic factors like entrepreneurial persistence, luck, and cost shocks, and some of the successes occur in areas that usually fail. ER -