Risk Taking Propensity and Export Performance of Croatian Exporters

Export performance is today one of the most widely used measures of a company’s success, due to the globalization and market liberalization processes. The rather bad export performance of Croatian exporters can be explained by a number of factors, one of which is assumed to be the low level of risk taking propensity, which is one of the three major dimensions of entrepreneurial behavior. The aim of this paper is to analyze company age, size and type of business as determinants of risk taking propensity in Croatian exporting companies. Cluster analysis based on four variable criteria was used in order to determine risk and non-risk takers’ clusters and analyze the significant differences between them in relation to their export performance. The paper is based on research of 88 Croatian exporters.