title: An economic evaluation of public programs for internationalization: the case of the Diagnostic Program in Spain.
abstract: This paper evaluates the Diagnostic Program in Spain which is a publicly funded program to promote internationalization of companies located in Andalusia (south of Spain). The methodology used is the propensity score-matching. The treatment group consists of companies which participated in the Program until 2008. The control group has companies which planned to participate in the Program but had not done so up to that date. The response variable measures the ratio of export to total sales for each company. Four covariates have been taken into account: activity, location, sales and number of employees. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the companies that participated in the Program improved their ratio of exports to total sales by about 10 percentage points.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economic Analysis and Political Economy, Facultad de CC, Economicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Sevilla, Ramon y Cajal, 1, 41018 Sevilla, Spain. Electronic address: jmcansino@us.es.
authors.forename: José M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Cansino
authors.forename: Jaime
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lopez-Melendo
authors.forename: María del P
authors.initials: Mdel P
authors.lastname: Pablo-Romero
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sánchez-Braza
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce / Q000191:economics / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004467:Economics; D038622:Internationality; D015397:Program Evaluation; D057216:Propensity Score; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D058012:Small Business / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013030:Spain
keywords: H 43; H 59; Internationalization programs; O 24; Propensity score-matching; Public policies evaluation; Statistical causal inference