This paper asks whether and why advanced countries differ in their ability to export to China and India. We exploit a newly collected, comparable cross-country survey of 15,000 European manufacturing firms (EFIGE). The dataset contains information on firms' international activities and characteristics such as size and productivity, governance and management structure, workforce, innovation and research activity. We identify the firm characteristics that are correlated with exporting activity in general as well as with exporting to China and India conditional on being an exporter. In line with existing literature, we prove that larger, more productive and innovative firms are more likely to become exporters and to export more.
Our results also provide new evidence on the role of governance: while there is not a strong negative effect of family ownership, a higher percentage of family management reduces a firm's export propensity and export volumes. Regarding China and India, we find that firms exporting there are on average larger, more productive and more innovative than firms exporting elsewhere.
