Free lunch or vital support? Export promotion in The Netherlands

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add to the debate concerning the merits of export promotion efforts by governments by investigating the effect of export promotion program (EPP) participation on the export performance of Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach – The authors confront participation data of an EPP targeting SMEs with rich firm-level data and use propensity score matching techniques combined with regression analysis. Findings – The authors show that exports generated by participants do generally rise in the years after program entry, h... Mehr ...