Milan Čupić and Stefan Vržina
Despite exports having been the subject of academic attention for decades, associating exports with firm performance is unclear. Previous studies have produced two opposite theories. The learning-by-exporting hypothesis states that exports improve firm performance due to knowledge transfers from foreign markets to exporters, on the one hand, whereas on the other, those advocating the self-selection hypothesis argue that firms with better financial performance are more likely to export. This paper aims to examine the relationship between exports and the performance of firms in Serbia. The results of this research study show that exports are statistically significantly associated with productivity, this finding being robust to changes in the productivity measure and the sample size. Associating exports with firm profitability, however, is sensitive to changes in profitability measures. In addition, the research results are more typical of the manufacturing sector. Several reasons for the poor performance of Serbian exports and several recommendations with respect to that are offered in this paper.
Milka Grbić
Financial intermediaries have the key role in making a connection between savings and investments. Given the fact that an effi cient transfer of savings into investments is made more diffi cult by transaction and information costs, fi nancial intermediaries are specialized in minimizing the said costs per unit of invested capital. They are also trained to identify productive and innovative investment endeavors which contribute to the growth of real output. Real output growth is the basis for increasing the fi nancial potential, which creates the basis for the development of fi nancial intermediaries. In connection with that, apart from the analysis of the relevant factors making the process of the mobilization and transfer of savings more diffi cult, the theoretical models that put an emphasis on the relationship between the effi ciency of fi nancial intermediation and economic growth are discussed in the paper. The research results are indicative of the fact that the improvement in fi nancial intermediaries’ business doing enables faster economic growth. Simultaneously, the growth of the economic activity increases the scope of the business operations conducted by fi nancial intermediaries. Thanks to the eff ects of the economies of scale that contribute to a reduction in transaction and information costs, the effi ciency of fi nancial intermediations grows.