How Foreign Banks Facilitate Trade in Tranquil and Crisis Times: Finance or Information?* by Stijn Claessens, Omar Hassib, and Neeltje van Horen* September 2014 Abstract Financially developed countries tend to export relatively more in financially vulnerable sectors, suggesting access to finance to be an important channel for promoting trade. This paper shows that in addition the presence of foreign banks plays a critical role in trade, specifically via two channels. First, bilateral exports tend to be higher in financially vulnerable sectors when the share of foreign banks is higher (finance channel). Second, this is even more so when foreign banks from the importing country are present (information channel), with the role of bilateral foreign bank presence especially strong in less developed economies and when institutional differences between the importing and exporting country are greater. Further supportive evidence is that during the global financial crisis exports from financially vulnerable sectors suffered less when foreign banks were present, except when they came from an importing country that suffered a banking crisis itself. * Stijn Claessens is at the IMF, University of Amsterdam, and CEPR; Omar Hassib is at Maastricht University; and Neeltje van Horen is at De Nederlandsche Bank. We are grateful to JaeBin Ahn, Frederic Lambert, and seminar participants at Maastricht University for comments, and to Yangfan Sun for help with the bank, trade and UNIDO data. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the institutions they are affiliated with. E-Mail addresses:
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