Countertrade transactions may cover 20 percent of international trade yet are little researched. Testing several coherent models on 230 transactions (mainly East-West), the authors find (1) strong evidence that they effect price discrimination for Western exporters; (2) no support for a model...

Starting with the international debt crisis in the 1980s, international barter increased substantially. More recently, barter has emerged in Russia and South East Asia. This paper examines how barter can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they cannot use standard credit...