The Impact of Non-Resource Export Support on the Exports of Russian Companies

The sanctions imposed on Russian foreign trade in 2022 led to a large-scale reorientation of exports toward neutral countries. This need to find new sales markets has increased the use of the existing ways to support non-resource exports and prompted calls to improve them and adapt them to address new conditions. The evidence of strain on various types of export support highlights the importance of assessing their effectiveness and ultimately optimizing them and refining how they are targeted. To that end, the article uses firm-level data for 2015 through 2019 to assess the impact of supports for non-resource exporters on diversification across products and countries and on export volumes of Russian companies. To minimize bias caused by firms self-selection into the group of support recipients, the study employs a wide range of control variables to construct a model for the probability that a firm is receiving support for its exports. The predicted values from this model are then used for propensity score matching and for comparing the dynamics of export activity among comparable firms. The results indicate that, in the year following a company’s request for export support, foreign market deliveries increase by an average of twelve percentage points. This growth is driven primarily by geographic expansion of exports and by broadening product ranges rather than by export intensity. A conservative estimate puts the value of increased exports from non-resource export supports at USD 1.4 billion in 2019.