This article tries to portray the development of the empirical literature on the determinants of trade exports and productivity applied to the Brazilian case. For this, we argue, from the perspective of trade models for heterogeneous firms, some of the main results of national and international literature relating to the hypothesis of entry costs and hysteresis in exports, self-selection and/or learning by exports and the relation between trade liberalization and productivity of firms. Overall, the paper concludes that the national literature closely follows the results reported by international literature. These results favor the acceptance of the hysteresis hypothesis, self-selection and learning by exports. However, the phenomenon of industrial reallocation, theoretically predicted in the literature, and their consequent impacts on the evolution of the productivity of Brazilian industry, did not occur in the Brazilian case.
models of trade with imperfect competition and scale economies; heterogeneous firms; productivity; hysteresis in international trade
