The relationship between trade and industrial performance has received a great deal of empirical attention over the past three decades. Much of this empirical attention has however focused on productivity, employment, and output growth oblivious of profit effects – the primary motive for manufacturers. Different from this literature, this paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by testing the hypothesis that trade affects profit efficiency of manufacturing industries through its effect on technical and allocative efficiency. Using a panel stochastic frontier model based on 28 South African manufacturing industries observed between 1970 and 2016, evidence confirms a strong positive effect of export intensity on profit efficiency that operates mainly through technical efficiency. Import penetration appears to have improved allocative efficiency without having a discernible effect on profit efficiency. The former result lends empirical support to the long-standing view that outward-oriented policies have the potential to enhance industrial profit maximization while the latter result suggests that inward-oriented polices at worst promote suboptimal input allocation.

在过去的 30 年中，贸易和工业绩效之间的关系受到了大量实证研究的关注。然而，这种实证研究的大部分注意力都集中在生产力、就业和产出增长上，而忽略了利润效应——制造商的主要动机。与这些文献不同，本文通过检验贸易通过其对技术和配置效率的影响来影响制造业的利润效率的假设，为现有知识体系做出贡献。使用基于 1970 年至 2016 年间观察到的 28 个南非制造业的面板随机前沿模型，证据证实出口强度对主要通过技术效率运作的利润效率有很强的积极影响。进口渗透似乎提高了配置效率，但对利润效率没有明显影响。前一个结果为长期以来的观点提供了实证支持，即外向型政策有可能促进工业利润最大化，而后一种结果表明内向型政策在最坏的情况下会促进次优的投入配置。