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The rising uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment exacerbate the challenges firms face in the export market. This study aims to explore which strategy is suitable for export enterprises to develop sustainably under COVID-19.

Based on the sample data of China’s A-stock listed manufacturing firms from 2010 to 2020, this study applies a survival analysis method to explore the impact of strategic flexibility on export firm survival. Furthermore, this study uses the difference-in-difference model to test the relationship between strategic flexibility and firms’ profits in the context of the pandemic.

The results show that strategic flexibility can increase firms’ survival time, improving dynamic production and innovation capabilities, which is favorable for their sustainable development. Meanwhile, after the spread of COVID-19, firms with strategic flexibility have higher profits than those without. This influence mechanism mainly involves exploring new markets that can improve the company revenue and the coordination capabilities of the supply chain; this reduces corporate costs.

This study expands relevant research on the factors affecting the survival of export enterprises and supplements research on the economic consequences of firms’ strategic flexibility; this also enriches the dynamic capability theory. Additionally, it provides important implications for firms to enhance strategic flexibility and recommends government implementation of policies that encourage the domestic sales of commodities originally produced for exports under COVID-19.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether, of China's food and agriculture (agri-food) export, the trade relationships along the extensive margin can transform into short-term ones, and further convert into long-term ones along the intensive margin with survival and maintenance, especially, under what kind of conditions these transformation realize successfully, and what the factors are and how they impact on the length of the trade relationships duration.

The paper comprises three stages: decomposing China's agricultural export data (1999-2008) into highly disaggregated three distinct parts; with the Kaplan-Meier (KM) nonparametric estimation, discovering the practical source of stable and long-term export growth, and the threshold at which the short-run trade relationships deriving from newly established ones convert into long-run ones successfully; by semi parametric estimation through Cox proportional hazard model, preliminarily examining the possible impact of different factors on the trade relationship's hazard rate and duration.

The paper reveals that China agri-food trade pattern at the product level is surprisingly dynamic with newly established trade relations being more likely to fail. While the frequent volatilities of short-term relations at the extensive margin could be used to evaluate the source of short-term export growth especially and effectively, the pattern of negative dependence together with the threshold effect of duration indicates, only when these short-term relations live longer than four years will they substantially contribute to a stable and prolonged export growth. Simultaneously, trade duration significantly correlates to importing country's development status, region it belongs to, product processing degree, export experience and geographical space between trading partners.

To avoid the likelihood of misleading when estimating quantitatively the source of long-term export growth, researchers should be cautious in accurately evaluating the impacts of all possible factors on the two trade margins' performances, which is beyond the scope of this paper though, and a matter of ongoing work on the research agenda.

The study presents a set of important policy implications. Now that turnovers along the extensive margin have little impact on long-term China agri-food export growth, it turns out that improving export survival would result in significantly higher and stable export growth.

By distinguishing the survival of trade relationship channels from their deepening, the discoveries in the paper are crucial to understand the different role the intensive and extensive margins play in China agri-food export growth. The diversified hazard rates of export relations in different duration intervals suggest that the constant hazard rate assumption in Melitz and Bernard et al. is in some sense not appropriate.

Drawing on the literature that has shown the prevalence of short-lived trade relationships, the purpose of this paper is to provide further understanding about this issue by exploring the impact of engaging in Global Value Chains (GVCs) on the chance of export survival at product-country level, paying special attention to the differences between advanced and developing countries. The authors also investigate whether the type of GVC participation (backward or forward) matters for export survival.

To capture to what extent a country’s exports are integrated in GVCs, the authors use the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output database to estimate value added incorporated in exports. Through the estimation of a discrete-time duration model, the authors explore the impact of engaging in GVCs on export survival using highly disaggregated trade data from the CEPII’s BACI database.

The findings endorse the hypothesis that deeper participation in GVCs is a key factor in explaining stability in trade relationships, mainly for developing countries where the trade flows are especially fragile. The authors also find different effects depending on the type of GVC involvement and on whether the value chain partners are advanced or developing.

The paper contributes to the literature by extending the understanding on the factors that promote the stability of exports, including among them, involvement on GVCs (and its forms) which is one of the most relevant factors to explain recent behavior of trade.

This article will select 25 years of subdivided data to perform Kaplan–Meier survival analysis on the export trade relations of Chinese wooden flooring, use discrete-time cloglog models to analyze influencing factors, use logit and probit models to test the robustness, and try to systematically reveal the duration of China's wood flooring export trade and its influencing factors.

This study used Kaplan–Meier survival function estimation method. In the survival analysis, survival function and hazard rate function are often used to characterize the distribution of survival time.

The continuous average export time of China's wooden flooring is relatively long, about 14 years. China's wooden flooring has a negative time dependency. After the export trade exceeds the threshold value of 15 years, the failure rate of trade greatly decreases, which has a “threshold effect.” Gravity model variables have a significant impact on the duration of China's wooden floor export.

Studying the duration of forest products trade is of great significance for clearing deep-level trade relations and promoting sustainable development of forest products trade.

This paper aims to explore the moderating effect of human capital in the form of a CEO’s educational background and firm age at the time of internationalization on growth and survival.

The research study is based on primary data gathered from 102 internationalized small and medium enterprises (SMEs) belonging to the engineering industry in Bangalore district, Karnataka, India.

The results reveal that human capital significantly improves sales growth but had no impact on the survival of internationalized SMEs.

The paper includes practical implications for the CEOs of SMEs to successfully strategize their efforts towards growth and survival in the international market.

This research study enhances the importance of human capital and its impact on the growth and survival of internationalized SMEs in the context of an emerging economy where research studies are limited and largely unexplored till date.

The present study aims to provide new evidence regarding the factors that determine the survival of firms in the Spanish wine industry and to improve the understanding of sector dynamics.

The empirical analysis, conducted over a representative sample of wineries in the DOC Rioja wine industry, is based on non-parametric (Kaplan–Meier graph) and semi-parametric survival models (Cox proportional hazard model).

The empirical model finds that wineries with a higher number of networks with institutions enjoy better survival prospects. This study also shows that a winery’s previous performance affects the winery’s survival probability; therefore, successful wineries in the past encounter a smaller hazard of exit. Although spending on R&D and exporting are factors likely to improve wineries' efficiency and competitiveness, these factors did not contribute significantly to the survival of DOC Rioja wineries.

This paper makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the determinants of wineries' survival and has important policy implications. In order to raise the probability of survival, policy makers should promote the networks that link wineries and institutions. Moreover, this study is based on survival analysis which, although frequently used in medical and behavioural sciences, has rarely been applied to wine economics. Finally, it uses a unique data set obtained from primary data collection, which previous studies have not analysed in relation to the probability of winery survival.

Though many studies in the past dealt with the survival and growth of enterprises both in the local- and export-markets, less attention was given to the analysis of the duration of enterprises entry into the export-markets. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to analyze the duration of Ethiopian enterprises entry into the export-markets.

This paper used data collected from 848 enterprises through a cross-sectional survey method conducted by the World Bank in 2015. In order to estimate the average duration – the time that enterprises need to wait before entering into the export-markets and the associated factors – the authors used the mixture of non-parametric (Kaplan-Meier) and parametric (Weibull) models.

The non-parametric results show that enterprises are required to wait for an average of about eight years before entering into the export-markets after their establishment. In addition, foreign-owned enterprises were found to be faster in entering into the export-markets than their domestically owned counterparts. The parametric results revealed that enterprises’ product innovation, enterprises’ size and age, and custom and trade regulations are factors that curtail the durations of enterprises entry into the export-markets. On the other hand, enterprises’ operational costs, the size of enterprises’ locality, and enterprises’ location are factors that slow the durations of enterprises’ entry into the export-markets.

This study is the first to offer pioneering evidences on the duration (time in years) that Ethiopian enterprises need to wait before entering into the export-markets and the factors that affect the length of their waiting time.

Home-peer firms (i.e. firms from the same industry and country) noticeably influence the internationalization behavior of small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing from vicarious learning literature, the authors theorize how home-peer firms' success in export markets affects SMEs' export intensity into those markets.

The authors test the hypotheses on a sample of 32,108 Canadian SME exporters. A Tobit model was used to examine the effect of home-peer performance and its interactions with firm age, export experience, and geographic and institutional distance on export entry intensity.

The authors find that SMEs are more likely to enter export markets with higher intensity if home-peer firms perform well in those markets. This home-peer influence is stronger when the SME lacks export experience, when the home-peer information is more recent, and when environmental uncertainty is high.

The study is among the first to show empirically that the performance of home-peers positively influences the export intensity of SMEs in international markets, suggesting that SMEs use this measure to inform their internationalization strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the network promotion role of export promotion programmes in driving small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) export performance.

Drawing on a dual institutional and network-based approaches to internationalisation, the study tests an integrative model that explores the mediating role of SMEs’ relationships in the link between government export promotion programmes (both informational and experiential forms) and export performance. The model was tested using a sample of 160 UK small and medium exporter firms. The data were analysed through a structural equation modelling technique.

The study finds that whilst both informational and experiential export promotion programmes improved all forms of SMEs’ relationships, only experiential forms had an indirect effect on export performance. Further, only relationships with foreign buyers had a positive impact on export performance.

The results of this research provide directions for export promotion organisations in targeting their network support provision and for SMEs in utilising such a support. The study calls for similar research in different contexts to validate the proposed model.

This study brings novel findings to the extant literature by conceptualising and validating the importance of the “network promotion” element of export promotion programmes.

The development of innovation capability is an important topic for both managers and academics. However, studies that investigate which elements integrate innovation capability in the context of export market are very scarce. Drawing on the resource-based view, the purpose of this paper is to identify important dimensions in order to build a scale to measure innovation capability in exporting firms – the INNOVSCALE.

The study draws on data collected by online questionnaire in a sample survey of 471 exporting manufacturing firms. The results were obtained using structural equation modeling. Statistical tests demonstrate that the scale presents composite reliability as well as convergent and nomological validity.

The findings reveal that innovation capability is a higher-order construct formed by four dimensions: product development capability, innovativeness, strategic capability, and technological capability. The results also indicate that all four dimensions of the innovation capability scale are positively and significantly associated with export venture performance.

This study develops a new scale, the INNOVSCALE, which is a measure of innovation capability of exporting firms, and tests its impact on three measures of export venture performance, namely financial, strategic, and achievement.