Abstract
Official export credit agencies (ECAs), a key pillar of the international financial architecture in the second half of the twentieth century, financed a significant share of exports from industrialized countries and provided larger debt financing for developing countries than either multilateral or bilateral creditors. Since the early 1990s, however, the world has changed dramatically. As noted in a conference in 2000 on the role of the U.S. Export-Import Bank in the twenty-first century, private credit insurance companies have “increasingly occupied the market” while “government-insured export business tends to account for a shrinking share of total exports in the major exporting countries.”1 Indeed, globalization, fueled by privatization and trade and capital liberalization, has significantly altered the landscape of international trade finance in recent years.2 Yet there are more ECAs than ever before, as developing countries launch agencies of their own.
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