| In order to deal with external shocks such as financial crisis, Each country has totake strong measures to stabilize exports and improve trade conditions to boost thecountry’s economic growth. Export diversification is one of the main measures.Diversification of export products has been documented to promote a country’seconomic growth. However, whether the increase of export volume can improvediversification of export products, and what factors can promote export diversificationlevels, that is essential.This article use Feenstra method and entropy index to measure89countries’export variety from1997to2011. The former is relative export diversificationreferring to the expansion speed of American’s export products,while the latter focuson the distribution of export product, and the more uniform of product categories inall departments,the higher of export variety. The results of Feenstra method show thatthe change of total amount exports and the change of export products diversificationis consistent, and the higher the income the higher export diversification. The resultsof the entropy index show that all level of export product diversification decline smallin the sample period and fluctuated frequently.Then, this paper constructs econometric models, which based on the mechanismanalysis on the factors of export diversification, enterprise heterogeneity theorymodel in Metlitz (2003) and Parteka&Tamberi (2008) and Agosin et al(2012) to testthe effect of various factors. The empirical results show that human capital,population size, trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, cross-term betweenhuman capital and technology gap, cross-term between human capital and thedevelopment of finance play significant role in promoting export product variety,while fixed costs have side effects.The results also found that there is a inverted "U"shape between GDP per capita and diversification. Finally, the article provides policyrecommendations according to these conclusions... |
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