Abstract: To comprehensively promote the socialist legal system construction and establish favorable business environment is a key to achieve a continuous and healthy growth of China’s economy. By making use of the business data from 422 small firms in manufacturing industry in China’s 30 provinces from 1998 to 2007 and adopting the two dimension index of the provincial legal environment and the degree of industrial contract dependence, this paper tries to conduct an empirical study of the impact of legal environment on China’s export behaviors with the estimation method of “difference in difference”. The results show that the improved legal environment has promoted the expansion of export intensive margin and extensive margin. The improved business legal environment can play a more significant role in promoting the export probability and export value of the enterprises in the more contract-dependent industries. The operating years, average wage and enterprise scale have greater impact on the export behaviors of the enterprises in the more contract-dependent industries, while the productivity paradox exists only in the contract-dependent industries with lower degree.

Key words: legal environment; contract execution; corporate export behavior