Resumen de Exporters' characteristics and the margins of trade.

Asier Minondo, Francisco Requena Silvente

• This paper investigates the influence of exporting countries' characteristics on the number of exporters (extensive margin) and the average exports value per firm (intensive margin). For that purpose, we use a new database compiled by the OECD and Eurostat in the year 2005, which allows the calculation of trade margins in bilateral relationships involving a large number of exporting and importing countries. We find that there is almost a one-to-one relationship between exporters' GDP and the number of firms that participate in export markets. This proportionality remains when we decompose GDP into an employment component and a labor productivity component.

  Our results also show that exporters' labor productivity is positively linked with the intensive margin of exports.