Morten Rask

Governments and other non-profit organizations have been providing information-oriented services for long to encourage exports. The primary targeted recipient of such services is Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME's). The effectiveness of such activities has been researched extensively until mid 90's. The work of McAuley (1993), Diamantopoulos et al. (1993) Katsikeas et al. (1994), Hart et al. (1994) and Crick (1995) are some of the representative. In the last few years, the Internet has emerged as an effective communication media. Recognizing the potential, a lot of export assistance is provided over the Internet. For the research community, this presents an opportunity to document and explain the developments. Our objective in this paper is three fold. Firstly, we in this paper review 25 export assistance web sites and summarize the Internet related developments. Secondly, we use Rask's (2002) model about web marketing strategies for conceptualizing the Internet related developments associated with export assistance. Finally, we highlight the implications of providing export assistance over the Internet. Those interested in export assistance research and those providing export assistance are foreseen as the prime beneficiaries of our analysis.