Foreign Firms and Export Performance in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Debt Crisis

This paper compares U.S.-owned affiliates with other firms in developing countries with respect to the shifts in sales from home to export markets in response to the debt crisis of the early 1980s. The U.S. affiliates in heavily indebted countries increased their exports and the share of their production exported more rapidly than other firms did after 1982, while affiliates in less indebted countries did neither. However, a large part of the shift in sales by affiliates in the heavily indebted countries involved sharp reductions in local sales, often larger than the growth in exports.