Trade and Integration Team Latin America and the Caribbean Region Office of the Chief Economist

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Policy Research Working Paper 5081 The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits " which account for most of the export value and where the "hit " includes both finding the right product and finding the right market. Higher export volumes are associated with higher degrees of concentration, after controlling for the number of destinations a country penetrates. This further highlights This paper—a product of the Trade and Integration Team, Development Research Group and the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region—is part of a larger effort in both departments to study how th