Export and investment promotion : sustainability and effective service delivery -- volume 1: synthesis of findings from Latin America and the Caribbean

This study assesses the merits of ten such organizations in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Chile, and identifies programs that have the greatest impact on exports and investment. Overall, promotional institutions provide services which the assisted firms, especially those in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, consider highly valuable to their export growth; they also provide an attractive rate of return to A.I.D.'s investment (conservatively estimated at 25% in real terms). Despite the benefits to individual firms, however, the programs' overall impact on nontraditional exports at the national level is generally not dramatic. Nor can promotional institutions serve as effective substitutes for policies favoring export-oriented investment. The most important services rendered by promotional institutions are informational; while needs vary from country to country, requests for market information and contact names seem to be universal. However, the data tentatively suggest that firms both foreign and domestic are most likely to benefit not from information customized to a targeted clientele -- as conventional wisdom would have it -- but from information standardized in the form of handbooks, short courses, and brochures.