Export promotion

Governments are increasingly confronted with scarce resources, which force their export promotion organisations to seek more efficient ways and methods. At the same time, with the export successes of the emerging economies, public export promotion policies of countries are confronted with diminishing returns, particularly when the traditional export promotion instruments are used. The DSM (Decision Support Model) approach to export promotion, which is adopted and explained in the book, is deeply rooted in the international marketing research literature and allows to identify, in the rapidly changing international environment, the most promising realistic export opportunities for exporting countries.

The chapters explain the DSM approach in detail and illustrate the most recent results for three countries: Belgium, South Africa and Thailand. They further elaborate on newer developments and applications such as the identification of export opportunities for services, as different from products, and the use of DSM results for assessing past export promotion programmes as well as recommending appropriate export promotion strategies at product level. The reasons why and how the identified DSM export opportunities have to be followed up by suitable Competitive Intelligence by export promotion organisations and supporting organisations, is also discussed.