1 NB Preliminary Draft: Please do not cite without the Authors ’ permission. Exporting and Productivity Growth: Micro Evidence from a Small Open Economy

There are growing literatures on identifying the sources of productivity growth and on exploring the differences between the characteristics of exporters and non-exporters. This paper combines these literatures by examining the contributions of exporters and non-exporters, both domestic and foreign-owned, to aggregate labour productivity growth in the Irish manufacturing sector. We apply the Foster, Haltiwanger and Krizan (2001) decomposition technique on an unbalanced panel of plants from the Irish Central Statistics Office annual Census of Industrial Production (CIP) for the period 1998 to 2004 to uncover the contributions to aggregate labour productivity of continuing, entering and exiting firms based on exporting and ownership status. We find that exporters are the dominant sources of growth and that over 90 percent of productivity growth is in foreign owned enterprises