Macroeconomic Effects of Export Guarantees in Austria

Trade credit is a regular feature in international trade. Due to longer distances and delivery time trade credit is used in about 80 percent of export cases. Austria supports domestic exporters by providing public export credit guarantees. Between 1950 and 2014 the difference between revenues and claims paid in the export credit guarantee system added up to just 70 million € or 0.03 percent of the accumulated insured sum. The long-run operational result is balanced. Stopping new commitments of export credit guarantees of the types G1, G2, and G3 would result in a long-term reduction of exports of goods and services by 1.9 percent with respect to a reference path; gross domestic output will be lowered by 0.6 percent, and about 30,000 jobs are expected to be lost. The integration of Austrian firms into international value added chains increased substantially between 1995 and 2011. For some products, the share of domestic value added is already below 50 percent, thus violating one of the eligibility criteria for export credit guarantees. Besides fully abandoning the value added criterion the Austrian government may consider lowering the critical value or combining a lower critical value with some predefined and fixed alternative criteria the exporting firm would have to satisfy.