Export Performance of India’s Organized Manufacturing Enterprises : Assessment Based on Firm-level Data versus Plant-level data

Plant-level data on India’s organized manufacturing enterprises reveal that about ten percent of the plants are exporting and the average export intensity is about five to six percent. By contrast, the firm-level databases on manufacturing companies in India that have commonly been used for studies on export performance indicate that about half or more of the manufacturing companies are exporting and the average export intensity is about 12 percent or higher. The paper investigates why such a big difference arises in the indicators of export performance between plant-level and firm-level data. Based on the analysis, it seems that the difference is traceable partly to the multi-plant character of manufacturing firms. Another explanation of the observed difference, probably a more important one, is that the company-level databases which have commonly been used for analyzing econometrically the export performance of Indian manufacturing firms include in general the relatively bigger companies out of the entire set of existing active manufacturing companies in India. These databases do not cover a large number of manufacturing companies in existence that are relatively smaller in size and in which export participation and export intensity are presumably relatively low. If the coverage of the firm-level analysis could be extended to include such companies, the level of export participation among manufacturing companies and their mean level of export intensity would probably be found to be not much different from the observed levels of these export performance indicators among manufacturing plants