How export barriers, motives, and advantages impact export performance in developing countries

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test empirically a model assessing the impact of internal and external barriers to exporting, motives for exporting, and exports' perceived advantages on export performance of Turkish SMEs. This paper makes two important theoretical contributions. First, our study allowed us to assess the impact of four sets of determinants on export performance simultaneously. Second, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first paper to validate a newly developed export performance scale (APEV financial and strategic performance, export venture achievements, contribution of the export venture to annual exporting operations, and satisfaction with export venture's overall performance) scale outside of the context of the original study used to develop it. We found that each of the four antecedents affects at least one dimension of export performance, substantiating most hypotheses. However, surprisingly, it showed that the impact of perceptions of external barriers on performance was positive, leading us to a speculative argument that trading barriers in fact force exporters to be more efficient and competitive.