Trade Finance and Payment Methods in International Trade

International transactions are riskier than domestic transactions for several reasons, including, but not limited to, geographical distance, longer shipping times, greater informational frictions, contract enforcement, and dispute resolution problems. Such risks stem, fundamentally, from a timing mismatch between payment and delivery in business transactions. Trade finance plays a critical role in bridging the gap, thereby overcoming greater risks inherent in international trade. It is thus even described as the lifeline of international trade, because more than 90% of international transactions involve some form of credit, insurance, or guarantee. Despite its importance in international trade, however, it was not until the great trade collapse in 2008–2009 that trade finance came to the attention of academic researchers. An emerging literature on trade finance has contributed to providing answers to questions such as: Who is responsible for financing transactions, and, hence, who would need liquidity support most to sustain international trade? This is particularly relevant in developing countries, where the lack of trade finance is often identified as the main hindrance to trade, and in times of financial crisis, when the overall drying up of trade finance could lead to a global collapse in trade.

Trade and Uncertainty

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the idea of uncertainty shocks with international trade. Firms order inputs from home and foreign suppliers. In response to an uncertainty shock firms disproportionately cut orders of foreign inputs due to higher fixed costs. In the aggregate, this leads to a bigger contraction in international trade flows than in domestic activity, a magnification effect. We confront the model with newly compiled US import and industrial production data. Our results help to explain the Great Trade Collapse of 2008–2009.

THE GREAT TRADE COLLAPSE: AN EVALUATION OF COMPETING STORIES

The reduction in international trade has been more than the reduction in economic activity during the 2008 financial crisis, against the one-to-one relationship between them implied by standard trade models. This so-called the Great Trade Collapse (GTC) has been investigated extensively in the literature resulting in alternative competing stories as potential explanations. By introducing and estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model using 18 quarterly series from the USA, including those that represent the competing stories, this paper evaluates the contribution of each story to GTC. The results show that retail inventories have contributed the most to the collapse and the corresponding recovery, followed by protectionist policies, intermediate-input trade, and trade finance. Productivity and demand shocks have played negligible roles.

Are Production Networks Passé in East Asia? Not Yet

Many people have a vague notion that the room for expanding international production networks is almost exhausted and that therefore international trade has slowed down since the recovery from the great trade collapse. This paper presents evidence against such a belief in the East Asian context by classifying finely disaggregated trade data based on the stages of the production process. The trade slowdown was attributed mainly to sluggishness of trade in primary goods and processed raw materials. In contrast, East Asian trade in manufactured parts and components and the assembled end-products within production networks continued to expand steadily.