THE EXPORT PERFORMANCE AT THE FIRM LEVEL: THE BRAZILIAN CASE

The evolution of the Brazilian economy presents an interesting case study on the relations between international trade and industrial organization factors. There are two distinct periods in the economy; the first one was characterized by massive import protection that insulated the domestic market from international competition, leaving room for an "inward-looking," capital and skill intensive industrialization. Evidence is presented showing that the industrial structure that emerged from the import substitution process was not far away from international standards of economic efficiency. In the second period, measures were taken to diminish the anti-export bias of the previous commercial policy and the results were impressive: manufactured exports grew at very high rates, changing its composition from labor to capital and skill intensive sectors. It is impossible to explain these changes in terms of the traditional trade model, since the sectoral export growth was more intensive in sectors which used intensively the country's scarce resources. The hypotheses of perfect competition, constant returns to scale, and identical production functions for all firms are in disagreement with the empirical findings: export concentration in large firms, imperfect domestic markets, economies of scale, import protection and export subsidies are the elements introduced in the analysis to explain export performance.;The estimated models--at the exporting firm level--indicate that size of the firm, its factor intensities, domestic monopoly power, the importance of multinational corporation and the type of the exported product (consumer or producer goods) are important factors to explain export specialization.;Finally, there are presented some policy conclusions dealing with the effects of export concentration in large firms, protected domestic markets and export subsidies on economic efficiency, growth, employment generation and income distribution.;It is shown that the exporting firms are not typical of the sectors in which they belong as admitted by the traditional trade model: they are larger, more capital and skill intensive than the non-exporting ones. This result indicates smaller effects on employment and income distribution of manufactured export expansion than those predicted by an aggregate analysis.