Browsing by Subject "Trade financing"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Trade finance matters: evidence from the COVID-19 crisis
(Oxford University Press, 2020) Demir, Banu; Javorcik, B.
This study documents a substantial decline in the exports of major trading nations taking place in March 2020. Accounting for product-specific seasonality and annual trends, the data suggest a drop by 38 per cent in France, about a quarter in Turkey and Germany, and 12 per cent in the US, relative to their historical averages. Detailed export data from Turkey, disaggregated by financing terms, show another striking pattern. Flows using bank intermediation which eliminates or reduces the risk of non-payment or non-arrival of prepaid goods, such as letters of credit or documentary collection, appear to have been much more resilient to the current downturn relative to flows using other financing terms. These findings suggest that access to trade finance is vital during times of heightened uncertainty.
Open Access
Trade policy changes, tax evasion and Benford's law
(Elsevier, 2020) Demir, Banu; Javorcik, B.
This paper draws attention to import duty evasion as a margin through which firms adjust to changes in trade policy. This margin is different from the other forms of adjustment, as it can be employed very fast and thus it may constitute the initial reaction to the shock before a slower adjustment through the other channels takes place. The study also proposes a new method of detecting tax evasion in international trade, based on deviations from Benford's law. It applies the method in the context of an unexpected policy change in Turkey that increased the cost of import financing. The results are consistent with an immediate increase in tax evasion in the affected import flows, which dies down a year later. A standard approach to detecting tariff evasion, based on “missing trade”, confirms these conclusions.