Online
Description
In the paper "Inclusive Trade Through Online Presence", Emmanuel Orkoh and myself examine whether online presence contributes to inclusiveness by helping firms that traditionally struggle to enter export markets do so. Using the World Bank’s enterprise survey data covering more than 180,000 enterprises from 154 countries, we find that being online has a positive and statistically significant effect on the probability of a firm becoming an exporter, increasing this probability by an average of sixteen percentage points. There is further evidence that online presence increases the level of a firm’s exports by at least twenty percent. We find that these results apply to enterprises managed by women, firms with a majority female workforce, small and medium-sized enterprises, firms from lower income countries and developing regions of the world, as well as firms in the services sector. These conclusions suggest that supporting digitalization can be an effective way of fostering more inclusive trade.
Files
Steps to reproduce
This folder provides instructions to replicate the results of "Inclusive Trade Through Online Presence" by Emmanuel Orkoh and Robert Teh. The files included in this package are: I. README.txt (this file) II. do files: folder with Stata do-files. The following six do files are included in this folder 0. directory 1. online.do 2. prepare_data.do 3. run regressions.do 4. auxiliary regressions.do 5. figures.do III. data: folder with Stata data files. There are four data files included in this folder. IV. tables: folder where all the tables produced during the replication will be placed. V. figures: folder where all the figures produced during the replication will be placed. VI. log: folder where a log of the calculations of the auxiliary regressions will be placed. INSTRUCTIONS Save the contents of the folder "Online" to your target drive. Before running any do file, please open the directory do file and change the directory path (in the first line) to match the target drive where the folder "Online" was saved. After completing this first step, the easiest way to replicate the results of the paper is to execute the "online.do" file. This is especially useful since the four do files that it invokes are interrelated and later do files require results generated by earlier do files. The following steps will then be executed: • creation of the database "online.dta" to be used in the analysis; • running the main regressions and saving the results to the folder tables; • running the auxiliary regressions the results of which are discussed in the paper and whose log file is saved in the log folder; • generating the six figures which appear in the paper and which will be stored in the folder figures. Note that it will take approximately an hour and a half to run the entire program. This is with the use of a mobile workstation equipped with 64 gigabytes of RAM and an Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 processor. Run time will be slower or faster than this depending on the hardware configuration employed.