Character Sets and Collations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 242

In the Export dialog, we can also choose the character set of the file to be created:
MySQL 4.1.x and Later
Since MySQL 4.1.x, the MySQL server does the character recoding work for us. Also,
MySQL enables us to indicate the character set and collation for each database, each
table, and even each field. A default character set for a database applies to each of
its tables, unless it is overridden at the table level. The same principle applies to
every field.