US high-technology export controls in a changed global environment, firm size, and competitiveness

Summary form only as given. With policies that impose barriers to export sales that do not exist for domestic sales, exporting of high technology products with actual or potential military applications have faced different treatment in the United States, for national security reasons. This paper explored the direct and indirect implications of high-technology export controls for the high-technology industry, by firm size and the overall US economy, using a fully specified recursive regression model on time series data for a 15 year period. An indirect effect is observed-whereby the export performance of particularly small high technology firms which appears to contribute positively to US global competitiveness, is adversely affected by export controls. Intuitively, small firms may depend more on direct export sales than the big firms which have other means (foreign direct investment, the use of overseas affiliates for foreign sales, etc.) of reaching international markets