Why don't we use the same export barrier measurement scale? : an empirical analysis in small and medium-sized enterprises

One of the most important issues addressed in research on international business, expecially on SMEs, is why certain companies export more than others. A frequent explanantion in the literature is that company directors and managers have different perceptions of obstacles or barriers to exporting. In that respect, in the last thirty years the literature on internationalization has studied export barriers without establishing a common classification and with no homogeneity in terms of either the number or types of existing barriers and their relative importance, nor a uniform approach to identify the most important barriers, the different types of barriers, or a scale in which they could be included. Therefore, we consider that there is a gap in the research on exporting and that it is necessary to establish a scale of exporting barriers that can be extrapolated to other studies of internationalization. Therefore, this paper seeks to review the main theoretical and empirical studies on export barriers, to propose an integrative classification of such barriers and to perform an empirical comparison of their perception so that the classification can be universally accepted and used in future studies on exports. Using a population of 2,590 companies (478 responses) and structural equations, we confirmed the four proposed dimensions or factors of export barriers, namely, knowledge, resources, procedure and exogenous barriers. The conclusions of this study offer a number of academic implications and contributions.