An Investigation on Exporting Costs of SMBs in Zhejiang Province

Since 2007 many exporting companies in China have been challenged by many difficulties such as shrinking demand, higher domestic inflation rate, fluctuating exchange rate of RMB, decrease of tax rebate rate, etc. In this paper we mainly analyzed the composition of exporting costs: product costs, expenses and financial costs. We also point out that those small exporting companies are more vulnerable to factors affecting exporting costs than their large counterparts. We further investigated 30 small and 5 large exporting companies in Zhejiang province. The result shows that smaller exporting companies face much higher exporting costs compared to larger ones, and that the financial crisis brought more pressures to smaller companies. Finally, we give some policy suggestions to support small exporting companies to overcome institutional barriers and lower exporting cost.