"The effect of countries' risk on the choice of financial instruments for international trade"

Countries' risk in choosing the type of finance products in international trade is important. Firms can buy special trade finance products from banks, the most common of which are letter of credit (LC), cash in advance (CA) and open account (OA). Based on import’s data of Iran from 79 countries during the years of 1393-1396 and using the panel data econometric model, this paper explores the effect of rule of law in origin and destination as a measure of countries' risk on choice of finance products in international trade. The countries are divided into three groups: low risk, medium risk and high risk. The results in this study showed that. Letters of credit are employed the most for export to countries with intermediate rule of law (contract enforcement), and they are used for riskier destination than cash in advances. As countries' risk increases, the use of letter of credit increases, but this relationship is not linear, so firms use less letter of credit with high-risk countries and use more open account. In other words, the effect of countries' risk or the rule of law index on employed the "letter of credit" as one of the important finance products is "hill-shaped".