Title: Does culture matter for international market selection?

Authors: Desislava Budeva; Michael R. Mullen

Addresses: Ramapo College of New Jersey 505 Ramapo Valley Rd, Mahwah, NJ 07430, USA ' Florida Atlantic University, 3200 College Ave, Davie, FL 33314, USA

Abstract: Selecting the right foreign markets to enter is considered to be one of the most important strategic decisions for firms. Many international marketing scholars predicted that cultural differences would matter in export success or failure. Nonetheless, no study to date has empirically demonstrated that cultural distance effects export success. Following calls by several researchers, we use a cross-sectional time-series analysis to test the influence of culture on export success. We base our study of the effects of culture on total exports and exports by industry using Inglehart's value system and data from two waves of the WVS. Cultural differences are found to have persistent and significance effects on export activity for total exports and across industries. We also control for many macro-environmental variables found to be significant in previous IMS research and for the first time in international market selection (IMS) research, the regulative and normative institutional differences are found to be significant for some but not all products.

Keywords: Inglehart's value system; international market selection; IMS; cross-sectional time series regression; World Value Survey; WVS; culture; cultural distance; exports; exporting firms; foreign markets; market entry; cultural differences.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEXPORTM.2016.081570

International Journal of Export Marketing, 2016 Vol.1 No.2, pp.193 - 214

Received: 03 Dec 2015
Accepted: 05 Sep 2016
Published online: 13 Jan 2017 *

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