Starting with the international debt crisis in the early 1980s the volume of international barter trade increased substantially. This paper examines how barter can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they cannot use standard credit arrangements. We argue that payment in goods is...

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behaviour of...