Abstract
Micro, Small and Medium sized-enterprises (MSMEs) are the basic form of business organisation in the Turkish Economy, comprising 99.8% of the business organisation; 76.7% of total employment; 46% of business turnover; 38% of capital investment; 26.5% value added; 10% of export and 5% of bank credit (OECD, 2004). As SMEs (Small Medium-Sized Enterprises) play a particularly important role, because of their number and because of the large share of the workforce involved, the Turkish governments have for many years carried out a variety of programmes to support SMEs to increase their export share. Exclusively, the design and implementation of such programmes have received increasing attention since Turkey joined the Customs Union with the European Union on 1 January 1996. This paper examines the differences between exporters and non-exporters SMEs in Turkey in order to understand the impact of government programs on their export decisions. The empirical data is from a survey of 300 Turkish SMEs (150 exporters and 150 non-exporters) in Turkey. As our question is of why some SMEs are exporting whilst the others of a similar size are not, although the government export promotion programs are same for all SMEs, the dependent variable should be dichotomous and the applicable analytical model should come from the binary-choice genre of models, namely Logit model as it takes the value 1 if the firms have been exporter, and 0 if have been non-exporter. Results suggest that government export promoting programs, size of the firms, manufacturing status of the firms, contribute positively to export performance in SMEs, but barriers such as, educational level of managers, lack of financial resources, lack of language knowledge, to many government regulations, high taxes, negatively affect the export performance of Turkish SMEs. We believe that our results might be considered by policy makers to achieve better and sustained export performance in the near future.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Publication status | Published - Nov 2009 |
Event | ISBE 2009: 32nd Institute for Small Business & Entrepreneurship Conference - Liverpool Novas Centre, UK Duration: 1 Nov 2009 → … |
Conference
Conference | ISBE 2009: 32nd Institute for Small Business & Entrepreneurship Conference |
---|---|
Period | 1/11/09 → … |
Keywords
- Government Export Policy
- SMEs
- Logit Model