Essays Evaluating the Impact of Government Support on Exports

In this thesis, I report a set of three studies designed to enhance our understanding of the impacts of government assistance on export. In two essays I employ empirical methods, which are the standard practice of government export support efficiency studies but with modifications regarding the theoretical models. These are followed by a conceptual essay that poses and discusses some research questions that are useful to ask in designing export support and in planning the evaluation studies. In the first essay, longitudinal population data of Estonian SMEs enabled me to compare and contrast the impacts of three government support instruments: support to attend a trade fair, to develop an export plan; and participation in a ministerial visit abroad. I describe how the interpretation of impacts differs in various dimensions of time – chronological "clock" time, "stopwatch" reference time, time sequence, and effect length time. By employing separate statistical tests to correspond to the use of multiple instruments, I also propose an optimal sequencing of the support. In the second essay, the dataset of innovative Chinese exporters allowed me to connect their innovation data with government R&D and export figures and survey data on motivational aspects within the firms. Borrowing from evolutionary economics, I establish a theoretical model of two rounds of "variation" and selection" that explains the stepwise impact to exports and the reasons for failures in each stage. In the third essay, I extend the discussion on time aspects from the first essay and the evolutionary dynamics from the second essay, and include a fundamental question from development economics - How to best target the aid? In particular I raise the question - What are the implications of allocating support to a greater or fewer number of firms and what are the tradeoffs? By combining empirical studies with conceptual discussions and including insights from other fields to a fairly traditionally empirical field of export support studies, I uncover some rarely acknowledged and discussed aspects of it. I also demonstrate that it is insufficient to merely discuss whether the government export support had a positive impact or not. Instead studies of export support need to adapt to a wider array of research questions. Further, the insights gained from a richer set of studies can then be used in designing better targeted and more impactful export support programs.