It is clear from the literature that increasing competitive pressure
triggers a range of firm responses depending on the market structure. One
of the potential responses is the introduction of new products as firms strive
to survive the product market competition pressure. In this paper, we check
the plausibility of this assertion on the agro-processing sector in the three
East African Community (EAC) countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
We exploit firm level data from the Enterprise surveys conducted by the
World Bank during 2006-07. The revelation from the data is that agroprocessing
firms in the three countries introduced new products in the face
of heightened competitive pressure potentially driven by reforms
undertaken since the mid 1990s.