Erm, no. qw() is just a special form of quoting (see perlop on "Quote-like Operators") and has nothing to do with the exporting of subs. The calling of the loaded module's import method by use is what's making things visible in the current package name space, and it would work just the same had he said use Carp 'croak' or use Carp q/croak/. It's just convention to use some variant of qw// because it allows you to easily specify a list of names to be imported with one set of delimiters.</pedant>

Update: Added link and remark on quote-like ops.