Investigating the impact of investment in research and development on export performance of enterprises in provinces of Iran

Nowadays, non-oil exports play an important role in import currency in the country. Experimental studies on exports show that the enterprises export rate is affected by various factors such as exchange rate, productivity and investment in research. The presents study aims to investigate the impact of investment in R & D on export performance of enterprises in provinces of Iran during 2000-2015, using systemic Generalized Method of Moment (GMM). Due to political geographical changes of the provinces in aforesaid years, country divisions are included 28 provinces and Alborz, North and south Khorasan provinces are not considered in the study as separate provinces. The required data are collected using the library and documentary method of annual census reports of industrial workshops in more ten employees and more of it and regional accounts in statistical center of Iran. The result of model estimation indicate that investment in R & D has a positive and significant impact on improving the export performance of enterprises so that increasing 1% investment in R & D leading to 0.063% increase in the export performance of enterprises. In addition to examine the impact of investment in R & D, the explanatory variables such as advertising costs, work force productivity, human capital, market share of industry sector of the total market of each province and total industry expenditure have been investigated. Results indicate that they have a positive impact on export performance of enterprises. Findings also showed that the work force productivity and market share of industry sector variables had the most impact on export performance among explanatory variables