Abstract EN:

This work aims to study the relationship between the entry to export market and industrial firm productivity in the Tunisian context. At the outset, we analyze Tunisian regulation and fiscal policy system of industrial firms and we focus on Tunisian trade policy during the last decades. In the second step, we review the literature on free trade theories and we review empirical papers that are related to the scope of the study. In the remainder of this work we developed and tested three hypotheses on the link between entry to export market and Tunisian firm productivity. Our hypotheses include self-selection, learning by exporting and conscious self-selection. For the purpose of this study we collected data on industrial Tunisian firms in the period from 1998 to 2003. In this period, Tunisia spent a lot of efforts in adopting and in implementing free trade policy. Our results show the existence of self selection phenomena in the industrial Tunisian firms. However we didn’t find any evidence of neither learning by exporting nor conscious self selection