The global e-commerce market has been rapidly expanding due to the development of digital platforms. When compared to traditional methods, internationalization via digital platforms has significantly reduced the cost of entering overseas markets, which is expected to open up new opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited capital or manpower. However, few studies have been conducted on domestic SMEs internationalization via digital platforms. Furthermore, little is known about the effects of relevant policies on SMEs’ use of digital platforms and internationalization.

Aiming to fill this research gap, this study collects data on Korean SMEs’ online exports (i.e., exports via e-commerce), the most representative type of SMEs’ internationalization through digital platforms, establishes stylized facts, and investigates the effects of Korean SMEs’ online export support policies. Based on the findings, we also provide policy implications.

In Chapter 2, we first conduct a survey on domestic SMEs’ online exports using a sample representing domestic SMEs registered as official e-commerce firms as of June 2021. Based on survey results, we document basic descriptive statistics on SMEs’ online exports behavior and investigate their main issues and policy demands.

Chapter 3 outlines Korea’s online export support policies for SMEs and explores the effects of five major online export assistance programs on SMEs’ online exports. For the estimation of the effects, we combined the survey data from Chapter 2 with information on the firms participating in the programs, which are provided by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and Korea Enterprise Data (KED).

Chapter 4 analyzes the characteristics of the e-commerce market and major digital platforms for major partner countries of Korean online exports. Furthermore, the characteristics and challenges of SMEs who export online are investigated in greater depth per partner country. The United States and China are the first countries to be studied, respectively representing developed and developing countries with substantial domestic online markets and super-sized digital platform firms. Among the emerging countries in the ASEAN region, Vietnam and Indonesia are chosen since the former has the highest imports from Korea and the latter has the largest population in that region.

Lastly, we provide policy implications in Chapter 5 based on the findings above, such as assisting SMEs in improving their online export capability, removing new-type trade barriers arising from cross-border e-commerce activities, protecting domestic SMEs from abuse of major foreign digital platforms’ monopoly status, and so on.