Interesting question. Unfortunately, I doubt economic theories will be of much help as they mainly deal with the macroeconomic perspective. For example, Ricardo’s comparative advantages will not help as firms compete based on their Smith’s absolute advantage. Perhaps the new “new” trade theory (the latest of the series Ricardo, H&O, Kugman) is the closest approach to international trade from a microeconomic perspective. Closer even to business management is the school studying international supply chains / global value chains. Here, you will find a continuum of approches, from sociology and political economy to strategic business (what is my core business, what to outsource or offshore ?), and supply chain management.

There will be no essential difference between exporting your product to oversea markets and selling your product inside of your country.

Of course, you should be able to overcome some initial barriers such as obtaining exporting licenses, safety certificates for your product, adapt your packaging that can be acceptable in the importing countries. The most important thing is that you should create market for your product, if your product is not known in the countries you want to export it. Operation management becomes much complicated than the case you are only selling your product in your country.

As Hubert Escaith put it, trade theories are not very helpful for dressing export plan for your company. However, if you want to know new trade theories and their characteristics, please read my recent presentation:

Post Keynesian Price Theory in view of Global Value Chains.

Besides many important theories You should pay attention to transaction costs and asymmetrical information theories.

As Yoshinori Shiozawa and Arvydas Guogis mentioned, today's international trade is just business with additional transaction costs (including some additional costs due to uncertainty on exchange rate, trade and economic policy and geopolitical factors).

In brief, you must decide what? and where?

I am sure business school authors have devised theories to select products (what) and markets (where). And your prices if you price-to-market (i.e., adapt your mark-up according to the local market conditions).

What?: what is your core business? what are you doing better than others?, what type of activity you want to push (and you can push: do you have sufficient knowledge and available labour?). Not to mention the opportunity cost of investing more into this line of products vs. other investment options.

Where?: this is typically an issue of market intelligence. The basics are evaluation of potential market present and future, who are your competitors on this market, how good they are (prices, quality) and if they are well established (limiting your capacity to enter the market without spending lots on money on advertisement or selling at a loss to capture market share --obviously, you do not wish to recommend dumping, as it is agains the law, do you?). Plus the macroeconomic and political uncertainties (here, you have lots of indicators on transparency, stability and so on and so forth).

If you want to go for multiple markets, you will need a team of legal advisors to follow local laws (tariffs and non-tariff regulations, etc.) or recrit law firms in the foreign market. It is here that the new "new" trade theory deals with the microeconomic aspects: exporting has a fixed (sunk) cost and only the most efficient and large enough firms are hable to enter into sophisticated export strategies. Smaller firms stay national or export only to a few well known foreign countries.

Not sure it helps, but those are my two cents.

Possibly, if i may suggest, consider international marketing as well as cross-cultural marketing theories and practice

The declared trade war between the USA and China covers a major stake for the USA, historically the cantor of free trade, and tariff reductions all over the world. This recent article published on August 2022 (however already well-cited!), by researchers from Princeton University, Princeton, Columbia University, and the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts [1] presents an exhaustive review of the question. The authors attempt to answer two crucial questions for international trade, today and forever: 1. What are the global welfare consequences of trade barriers? 2. How is this overall change distributed?

Drawing on previous literature, the authors reviewed approaches that have addressed the different components of the China-US trade war, and in particular the pass-through of tariffs to import prices. They also studied the distributive consequences of the trade war on consumers and producers, employment across sectors, and spatial impacts on income and consumption in the United States.

The findings of the study are instructive and lead to a conclusion presented in the form of an open question. One may read at the very end of the paper:

"The US-China trade war is the most important trade policy shift in recent decades, and it provides researchers with an unusual opportunity to study the mechanics of global trade. Throughout this article, we mentioned several questions that remain under-explored, including the various conjectures for complete pass-through that we have discussed.

First, a natural follow-up is to examine the longer-run aggregate effects of the trade war. This includes re-examining pass-through at different time horizons and levels of aggregation, but also systematically examining how pass-through varies along the supply chain from the dock to retail...

Second, what are the impacts of trade barriers imposed by US and China in terms of production relocation, risk versus efficiency trade-offs, and national security implications?

Third, as noted, US and Chinese firms could request exemptions from import duties, which raises natural questions: How did expectations of potential tariff rebates affect importer behavior, and what political-economy channels influenced the decisions of firms to seek exemptions and the government decisions to grant them?

Fourth, what are the dynamic implications of potential reductions in investment, changes in capacity, and access to imported inputs?

Turning to the distributional consequences of the trade war, the studies to date analyze proxies for consumption, short-run employment effects, and model-based implications for wages.

As time passes:

- what will survey and administrative data reveal about the distributional consequences through consumption and income channels?

- What will be the long-run implications for the spatial distribution of economic activity; e.g., will the trade war “undo” the labor market impacts of the China shock? ... Finally, outside the scope of this review are questions about the geopolitical implications of the US-China trade war.

Answering such questions often do not lend themselves easily to clean econometric studies, but insights may be learned from theoretical frameworks and work from other fields.

Such questions include:

- How much global “soft power” did the US gain or lose by initiating the trade war?

- How will the trade war affect the political relationship between US and China?

- And, how will the world trading system evolve in response..

[1] Fajgelbaum PD, Khandelwal AK. The economic impacts of the us–china trade war. Annual Review of Economics. 2022 Aug 12;14:205-28.

Available on:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29315/w29315.pdf

International business theories, for example internationalizion theories.