Was the Help Enough?: A Systematic Literature Review on Governmental Support of Small Medium Enterprises’ Export Performance

Government support ensures the export performance of mid-sized enterprises, especially in an intense global environment. Despite the abundance of research on governmental assistance for SMEs’ export success, conducting a comprehensive review of this subject has proven difficult due to the absence of review protocols that are complex for scholars to comprehend and reproduce. This study performs a thorough literature review on governmental support for SMEs’ export performance. The procedure comprises five stages: reviewing the protocol, defining research questions, identifying, screening, and determining eligibility for systematic research strategies, and the systematic research of literature based on two authentic databases, namely Web of Sciences and Scopus. This analysis advances the current literature by systematically classifying government support into financial and non-financial assistance, with the latter subdivided into five distinct types including (1) information, (2) marketing, (3) training, (4) trade, and (5) foreign office use support. This classification provides a systematic framework for comprehending the many types of support accessible to SME exporters. This research highlights the essential importance of non-financial support systems in enhancing SMEs’ export performance, in contrast to earlier studies that mainly focused on financial support.