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East Meets West: Innovative Forms of Foreign Trade Finance Between Italian Family Enterprises and Emerging SMEs in Romania

1997; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1741-6248.1997.00263.x

1741-6248

Paul McKibbin, David Pistrui,

International Business and FDI

The collapse of the USSR has created an opportunity for the rebirth of entrepreneurship and family business. Unfortunately, the transition economies of the former Soviet Bloc often lack the financial resources required to upgrade operations. This paper examines how an innovative form of finance, with historical roots in East-West European trade, helps drive the expansion of transition enterprises in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe, and at the same time provides export-led growth particularly for family-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the more developed nations of Western Europe. The technique, called forfaiting, allows businesses to control some of the risks that are inherent in dealing with emerging markets. We present a forfaiting model that demonstrates the way in which these singular transactions divide localized (transaction-oriented) risks from those risks that are associated with political instability, macroeconomic changes, environmental volatility, and force majeure. We follow this with presentations of actual examples of how forfaiting is being used between Italian family businesses and newly emerging private enterprises in Romania.