Big hits, export concentration and volatility

Recent empirical work has documented the high concentration of trade flows, and the large role played by few “big hits” in each country’s export. We propose a simple stochastic benchmark against which we assess each economy’s actual number of “big hits”. We show that most European countries underperform the benchmark, while China, the US and Germany do better. A low number of “big hits” (relative to our prediction) is associated with higher export volatility. Looking at possible determinants of “big hits”, we find they depend on the actual performance of each country, so that industrial policy needs to be country-specific.