Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to ...rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export profitability, while initially uncertain, is positively correlated over time and across destinations. This leads to “sequential exporting,” where the possibility of profitable expansion at the intensive and extensive margins makes initial entry costs worthwhile despite high failure rates. Firm-level evidence from Argentina's customs, which would be difficult to reconcile with existing models, strongly supports this mechanism.
► A model based on experimentation rationalizes new stylized facts in firms' export dynamics. ► The model posits that a firm's export profitability is correlated across destinations. ► Conditional on survival, fledgling exporters grow fastest at intensive and extensive margins. ► A firm is more likely to abandon a new export market if this is the firm's first export destination. ► We find strong support for our theoretical predictions using Argentina's customs data.
•We developed a typology of 13 main export patterns and 11 sub-patterns.•69% of Estonian exporters reduced or stopped exporting to at least one market.•58% of exporters exported only for 1 year.•True ...born globals and traditional (slow) internationalizers were rare.•Many firms had a low export share and/or a small number of export markets.
As exporting is the most common internationalization form, previous studies have tried categorizing export patterns but without using a full population of a particular country's firms for finding out how often every pattern occurs. We aim to develop a typology of 13 main export patterns and 11 sub-patterns and identify the frequency of each export pattern using detailed firm- and market-level export data for the population of Estonian firms. We conclude that 69% of Estonian exporters (excluding 1st-year exporters) reduced or stopped exporting to at least one market, 58% exported only for 1 year and that true born globals and traditional (slow) internationalizers were rare: many firms started exporting soon after foundation but had a low export share and/or a small number of export markets.
This paper analyzes spillovers from macroeconomic shocks in systemic economies (China, the Euro Area, and the United States) to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as well as outward ...spillovers from a GDP shock in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and MENA oil exporters to the rest of the world. This analysis is based on a Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model, estimated for 38 countries/regions over the period 1979Q2 to 2011Q2. Spillovers are transmitted across economies via trade, financial, and commodity price linkages. The results show that the MENA countries are more sensitive to developments in China than to shocks in the Euro Area or the United States, in line with the direction of evolving trade patterns and the emergence of China as a key driver of the global economy. Outward spillovers from the GCC region and MENA oil exporters are likely to be stronger in their immediate geographical proximity, but also have global implications.
This review problematizes literature on export assistance, one of the oldest and most significant topics in export research. Problematization embraces selective but broad literature, reflexivity, ...hermeneutical reading of text, and inclusion of the author’s voice. The sample comprises 95 studies published between 1968 and 2022. The review makes two critical contributions. First, it offers a synopsis of extant knowledge through an organizing framework which highlights the roles of governments, export promotion agencies, foreign trade offices and trade support institutions, in the design and deployment of onshore and offshore export assistance. In so doing, the review demonstrates that scholarship on export assistance can be summarized in four I’s – impetus, interventions, initiatives, and impact. Second, it uses two-sided non-refutational arguments to elaborate that while export assistance is possibly the most mature construct in export research, there are numerous unresolved questions. The areas of debate offer a platform for guiding practice and for setting an agenda for future studies.
•The review appraises extant knowledge on export assistance.•It marks one of the first attempts to problematize a body of research in International Business.•The review dissects stakeholders, types of assistance programs, operationalization issues, micro- and macro-level benefits, and contextual and temporal dynamics.•It encapsulates export assistance through four I’s – impetus, interventions, initiatives, and impact.•The review uses non-refutational arguments to discuss six areas of debate.•It adopts neglect-spotting to underline gaps and to chart directions for future research.•The review carries extensive implications for scholarship and practice
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to synthesize and evaluate recent studies on determinants of export performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a vote-counting technique this paper reviews ...124 papers published between 2006 and 2014 to assess the determinants of export performance.
Findings
The results indicate that significant progress has been made during these nine years and that: numerous new determinants are identified, data quality and statistical biases have received considerable attention, and interaction and indirect relationships are considered. However, at the same time, the research of export performance is still limited by a lack of synthetic theoretical basis, inconsistent empirical test results, and insufficiency in the research framework and statistical methodologies.
Originality/value
Export performance has received increasing attention over recent decades, but the area is still characterized by fragmentation and diversity hindering theoretical and practical development. This paper integrates the findings of recent studies on export performance and provides further discussion from both theoretical and methodological aspects, and points out the directions for future research.
Special Economic Zones Farole, Thomas; Akinci, Gokhan
2011, 08-01-2011, 2011-08-01, 20110101
eBook, Book
Open access
Ask three people to describe a special economic zone (SEZ) and three very different images may emerge. The first person may describe a fenced-in industrial estate in a developing country, populated ...by footloose multinational corporations (MNCs) enjoying tax breaks, with laborers in garment factories working in substandard conditions. In contrast, the second person may recount the 'miracle of Shenzhen,' a fishing village transformed into a cosmopolitan city of 14 million, with per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growing 100-fold, in the 30 years since it was designated as an SEZ. A third person may think about places like Dubai or Singapore, whose ports serve as the basis for wide range of trade- and logistics-oriented activities. In this book, the author use SEZ as a generic expression to describe the broad range of modern economic zones discussed in this book. But we are most concerned with two specific forms of those zones: (1) the export processing zones (EPZs) or free zones, which focus on manufacturing for export; and (2) the large-scale SEZs, which usually combine residential and multiuse commercial and industrial activity. The former represents a traditional model used widely throughout the developing world for almost four decades. The latter represents a more recent form of economic zone, originating in the 1980s in China and gaining in popularity in recent years. Although these models need not be mutually exclusive (many SEZs include EPZ industrial parks within them), they are sufficiently different in their objectives, investment requirements, and approach to require a distinction in this book.
Extant literature is equivocal on the effect of government-designed export promotion instruments and services (EPS) on firm performance. Moreover, literature examining the effects of EPS on exporting ...firms' success is dominated by a single performance perspective, namely, financial goal achievement. Further, the majority of the studies are conducted in developed countries, with limited attention to exporters in developing countries. In order to address these gaps, this study examines the impact of EPS use on export goal achievement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) from a developing country, while adopting a four-dimensional view of export performance. Based on a survey of 143 firms in Turkey, the findings suggest that EPS use improves all four export performance dimensions considered, namely, financial, stakeholder relationship, strategic, and organizational learning goal achievements. The article also delineates the performance effects of specific EPS. For example, stakeholder relationship goal achievement is influenced by only one EPS considered, namely, informational materials (e.g., brochures, pamphlets) on exporting. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for scholars, public policy makers, and managers.
► Government-designed EPS improve financial, stakeholder, strategic, and organizational learning through exporting. ► Financial goal achievement improves with the use of several EPS types such as introductions to buyers in importing firms. ► Stakeholder goal achievement improves with the use of informational materials only. ► Strategic goal achievement is influenced by both informational material as well as export financing use. ► Organizational goal achievement improves with the use of several EPS such as international market research and trade shows.
Building on the resource-based view (RBV) perspective of the firm and firms’ competitive capabilities, this study examines the digital export drivers as means for firms to exploit opportunities ...brought about by digital technologies in their B2C digital marketing activities. By leveraging a unique dataset covering 102 Italy-based firms of different sizes (small, medium, and large), active in three different sectors (design and furniture, fashion, and food and beverage), this work examines the role of firm resources to support internationalization via digital channels. We find that: (1) SMEs do not suffer from a weaker propensity to engage with digital export despite resources constraints; (2) firms leveraging digital technologies are more likely to enhance their digital export, regardless of firm size; (3) digital capabilities are critical as firms employing an e-commerce manager have a higher propensity to undertake digital export than firms relying on a traditional export manager, regardless of firm size.
Exporting is a critically important strategy for firms to grow, yet research in this area has tended to ignore how firms can leverage resource-based capabilities to improve export performance. ...Building on the resource-based view and institutional theory, the authors develop a novel perspective to explain how a firm can improve export performance by aligning its export channel with its level of market orientation capabilities, contingent on the institutional distance between home and export markets. Using a unique database of Chinese exporters, the authors find that exporters with strong market orientation capabilities prefer hierarchical export channels, while those with weak market orientation capabilities prefer hybrid channels. The analysis also indicates that the institutional distance between China and the export market moderates this relation. Moreover, the authors find that aligning export channel choice with firm-level market orientation capabilities and institutional distance yields better export performance.
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