Export Promotion

Federal Programs Lack Organizational and Funding Cohesiveness Gao ID: NSIAD-92-49 January 10, 1992

The federal government's export promotion programs, designed to encourage U.S. companies to sell goods or services abroad, provide business counseling, information, and training; conduct market research services; organize trade missions and trade fairs; and give export financing assistance. This report assesses the (1) rationale for and the resources devoted to these programs and (2) adequacy of recent attempts to consolidate and streamline them. GAO concludes that the government's present approach to export promotion lacks coherence because of the lack of an overall strategy to guide agency efforts. As a result, the government lacks reasonable assurances in today's highly competitive economic environment that its export promotion resources are being used to emphasize sectors, regions, and programs with the highest potential return.

GAO found that: (1) in fiscal year 1991, the U.S. government spent $2.7 billion on export promotion programs and $21.4 billion on export loans, export credit guarantees, and export insurance; (2) funding for the ten executive branch agencies involved in export promotion is not made on the basis of an explicit governmentwide strategy or set of priorities; (3) agricultural programs receive the most funding even though the agriculture sector only accounts for about 10 percent of total U.S. exports, and a significant portion of that goes to large established U.S. firms; (4) in 1990, the President created the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee to cope with export promotion; (5) the Committee has achieved some success, but has not addressed the issue of how to consolidate the government's export promotion programs; and (6) the Committee faces several obstacles to achieving its goal of unifying the government's export promotion programs, since the Committee lacks permanence and does not have the authority to set programs or budget authorities across government agencies.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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