Helping Western Balkan SMEs Expand Exports Through Online Training and Consulting

One of the key challenges facing innovative small and medium enterprises is customer acquisition. This is especially a constraint in less populated countries like those in the Western Balkans, where domestic demand can be limited for specialized services and products. Exporting to larger and richer countries provides a potential solution, but expanding into foreign markets involves considerable search frictions, and small firms may lack the skills and confidence to market to foreign buyers. The authors test the effectiveness of a capacity building program that aimed to help firms bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic and help them expand their markets and export more. The results show that capacity building can help provide the skills and confidence for innovative SMEs to better reach and sell to foreign buyers. They also provide some of the first evidence on offering training virtually to firms in multiple countries at once, which offers promise for the scalability of such efforts