What Determines Export Performances in High-tech Industries

The paper aims to identify the determinants of exports in high-technology sectors (high-tech, HT) of Visegrad countries (the Visegrad four, V4: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) and the core member states of the European Union (EU). Based on the augmented gravity model, we estimate the regressions on panel data of the bilateral export flows of the EU-15 and V4 with the rest of the world in 1999–2011, by employing the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator. The comparison of the estimations of overall export flows with the estimates explicitly done for the high-tech sectors allows us to outline the main characteristics of the existing gap in high-tech export performances of the EU-15 and V4. Estimation results find that while for the EU-15, human capital accumulation is statistically significant and export flows increase with similarity in physical capital accumulation of the trade partner; for V4, instead of similarity, the difference in physical capital stock increases exports and human capital accumulation does not yield statistically significant effects.