Analysis and evaluation of policies concerning trade internationalization

The aim of this work is to provide new theoretical findings and evaluative evidences for the design of policy interventions aimed at the promotion of trade internationalization among firms, particularly SMEs. The first part of this work analyses the contextual features and illustrates the main interventions under study, by focusing on the tools and actions that firms have availed themselves in recent years (starting from 2006). The second part of the report presents an actual impact evaluation, carried out using counter-factual statistical techniques. This sort of evaluation is particularly difficult because the examined firms have often received a variety of supports (funding for participating in trade fairs, business-to-business transactions, expert advices and subsidies), sometimes concurrently sometimes sequentially over time.