Foreign trade provides significant benefits to nations from both macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives. From a macroeconomic point of view, exports allow the increasing of foreign exchange reserves and generate employment opportunities, consequently leading to improved living standards. From a microeconomic perspective, exports stimulate the development of competitive advantages, reducing idle production capacity, raising technological standards, powering profitability, intensifying return on investments, and enhancing firms financial stature. SMEs export performance is particularly of utmost importance since they are responsible for a significant portion of economic activities and could amplify substantially exports outcome at the aggregate level. However, export barriers and market failures tend to affect their capacity to access strategic resources necessary to guarantee a successful internationalization process. From a resource-based perspective, the inability of SMEs to successfully expand abroad due to their lack of sufficient internal resources, know-how, and information about foreign markets may be seen as a condition of market failure, therefore endorsing government s participation in export promotion initiatives. In accordance with this rationale and building on the existing knowledge, the aim of this thesis is to contribute to the investigation of export promotion services and systems in three essays. The first essay, entitled Export Promotion Services and Firm Export Barriers: Do These Literatures Interact?, – aims to thoroughly examine the two literatures, presenting their contributions, gaps, and recommendations for future studies. The second essay, entitled Export Promotion Initiatives in a Cluster, - approaches the long-term development of a Brazilian beachwear cluster, using the case method of investigation and focusing specifically on the attempts to develop exporting activities. Export promotion agents have tried to introduce new practices and attitudes toward cooperation among firms but failed to do so. The key issue, therefore, is to understand why the firms failed to cooperate, despite several initiatives and investments to promote collective actions. The paper advances some possible explanations, with implications to other Brazilian clusters. Finally, the conclusion advances some recommendations for public policymakers concerning the design of export promotion programs. The third and last essay, entitled The Coordination of Export Promotion Networks for the Creative Industries, examines through the use of the case method of investigation the different approaches adopted by three successful countries in supporting the internationalization of their creative industries, adopting an interorganizational perspective, focusing on network coordination. The study provides empirical evidence of how different approaches, from the centralization of an export promotion network to decentralization, and from loose coordination to tight, may be used to promote the exports of firms in the creative industries. The results also suggest that each context may require a different approach to the coordination of Trade Support Institutions activities. The degree of economic development of each country, the resources available, the maturity of the industry, as well as cultural issues, may play a role in determining which approach could be a better fit for each country and sector.