Importing and Firm Export Performance: New Evidence from South Africa

This article uses firm-level data from company income tax and customs declarations from SouthAfrica to analyse the complementary relationship between direct access to imported intermediateinputs and firm exports in the manufacturing industry. There are two main findings. The first ison firm heterogeneity, showing that firms that import and export consistently demonstrate pre-miums in terms of productivity, employment, wages and capital intensity in production com-pared to firms that do not trade, or only export or import. The second supports the hypothesisthat importing raises exports, especially if inputs are sourced from advanced economies