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

Authors: Nihat Kamil Anil; Aviv Shoham; Gregor Pfajfar

Addresses: Vize Vocational College, Kirklareli University, Vize, Kirklareli, Turkey ' Department of Business Administration, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel ' Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva pl. 17, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

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.

Keywords: export performance; developing countries; exporters; export barriers; export motives; perceived advantages; Turkey; SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises; firm performance; financial performance; strategic performance; external barriers; trading barriers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEXPORTM.2016.081554

International Journal of Export Marketing, 2016 Vol.1 No.2, pp.117 - 141

Received: 14 Nov 2015
Accepted: 21 May 2016
Published online: 13 Jan 2017 *

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