Importing, exporting and the productivity of services firms in Sub-Saharan Africa

We examine productivity differences between trading and non-trading firms in the services sector using data on a sample of 19 Sub-Saharan African countries. A variety of parametric and non-parametric tests are implemented in order to examine whether exporters, importers and two-way traders perform better than non-traders, and whether there are differences in performance between different types of trading firms. Our results indicate that services firms that are engaged in international trade perform significantly better than those firms that trade on the domestic market only. While two-way traders tend to perform better than importers only and exporters only, few differences in performance are found between these latter two groups.