Trade facilitation and firms exports: Evidence from customs data

Using Egypt firm-level customs data and the World Bank Doing Business data for the period 2005–2016, this paper investigates the impact of administrative barriers to trade on firms’ exports. A gravity model is used, and a Poisson-Pseudo Maximum Likelihood regression is estimated to account for the significantly large share of zero trade flows in our dataset. Our findings confirm that time to trade can be perceived as a fixed and a variable cost that affects both the extensive and the intensive margins. At the sectoral level, we find that while agriculture and manufacturing are affected by time delays, fuel is not. Perishable and seasonal products are found to be more sensitive to time to trade than other products. Finally, findings by firms’ size show that superstars are more adversely affected by administrative barriers to trade than small and medium exporting firms.