The Features of a Survey on the Export Decisions of Swedish Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

This paper presents the features of a survey on Swedish firms' export decisions conducted in February 2015 focusing on a sample of 10,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. The survey was divided into two major sections. The first section targeted all firms and focused on firms' general situation (e.g. competition, type of co-operations, etc.). The second section focused on firms' export decisions and was only addressed to current, former and future exporters. Around 3,000 firms answered the questionnaire within a three-month period. We show that the survey does not suffer from any non-response biases by investigating whether respondents differ from non-respondents, whether early respondents differ from late ones, and whether the respondents' answers can be validated with external and more objective information. We are therefore confident that the survey may be used to represent the total population of small and medium-sized enterprises in the Swedish manufacturing sector.