• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.87-99
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• 2018

Purpose - The Export Infrastructure Strengthening Program(EISP) is a project to expand exports of agri-food products through providing customized export information to food distribution companies and supporting overseas information activities. A total of 39.6 billion won was provided by 2016. So, the purpose of this study is to analyze whether EISP is effective for expanding exports of agri-food products. Research design, data, and methodology - A simple average difference between the export performance of the policy beneficiaries and the non-policy beneficiaries can be biased if the export capacity or inherent characteristics of the enterprise are not taken into consideration. In order to solve the problem of such a bias, the propensity score matching(PSM) method has been employed in this study. PSM is a method of converting the characteristics of an export company into an index through logit analysis and then reducing the matching to one dimension to improve the accuracy of the performance measurement. Results - The balancing test was conducted to determine how the characteristics of the policy beneficiary group and the matched policy non-beneficiary group corresponded to each other. As a result of the test, we could not reject the null hypothesis that there was no difference between the two groups, so that after the matching, the two groups were similar and the explanatory variables were well controlled. Using the nearest neighbor matching with propensity score estimating through logit analysis, we estimated average treatment effect on the treated(ATT). The food companies participating the EISP had the effect of increasing the exports of $ 5.88 million. As a result, the number of export contracts increased by 11.77, the number of exporting countries by 7.52, the number of export items by 47.51, and the number of buyers' consultation by 3.50. And overseas marketing expenses increased by 35.92 million won. Except for the number of export contracts, other export performance results showed statistically significant results. Conclusions - As the EISP has a positive effect on the expansion of agro-food exports, efforts should be made to find out the limitations or problems of the policy in the future and to make a greater contribution to the increase of exports.