What Are Export Credit Agencies?

Export Credit Agencies, commonly known as ECAs, are public agencies and entities that provide government-backed loans, guarantees and insurance to corporations from their home country that seek to do business overseas in developing countries and emerging markets. Most industrialized nations have at least one ECA.

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ECAs are now the world's biggest class of public finance institutions operating internationally, collectively exceeding in size the World Bank Group, and funding more private-sector projects in the developing world than any other class of finance institutions. ECAs collectively finance more than double the World Bank Group's number of extractive sector projects (oil, gas, mining). ECAs generate odious debt and abet corruption. Some even support the export of arms and military equipment to dictatorial regimes. As a result, ECA-backed projects often despoil the environment and disrupt the lives of local communities — it's a race to the bottom.

In 1997 an international campaign to reform ECAs was born. Participating organizations campaign for change on both a policy level (seeking stronger safeguard policies for ECAs) and a project level (seeking to halt or improve harmful ECA-backed projects).

In the year 2000, over 347 non-governmental organizations endorsed the Jakarta Declaration — a platform statement summarizing the goals of the international ECA reform movement. The top objectives of this movement are:

• Transparency, public disclosure and consultation on ECA policies and projects;
  
  
• Binding common environmental and social standards;
  
  
• Explicit human rights criteria to guide ECA operations;
  
  
• Binding criteria to bring an end to ECAs abetting corruption;
  
  
• An end to the financing of arms;
  
  
• The cancellation of ECA debt for the poorest countries.
  
  

Only in 2001 did most ECAs introduce weak social and environmental standards: the so-called Common Approaches (revised in 2003). The ECA Watch network now advances a campaign to strengthen policy reforms and to resist projects with harmful impacts to the environment and affected communities.

What are ECAs? Learn more about the ABCs of ECAs.

Race to the Bottom: Take II 2003 ECA campaign report updating the 1999 Race to the Bottom report (below). This presents a civil society proposal for reforming the OECD Common Approaches on Environment, supported by nine case studies of ECA-backed projects from all over the world.

A Race to the Bottom: Creating Risk, Generating Debt and Guaranteeing Environmental Destruction 1999 A groundbreaking report, prepared by an international network of environment and development groups. This profiles a sampling of instances of environmental and social negligence by ECAs, illustrated by case studies and analyses.

ECAs: the Dirtiest Secret of Globalization Printable Brochure.

• Read the Brochure in Spanish

More Useful Reading on ECAs:

An Introduction to Export Credit Agencies: What They Are and How They Effect the Environment, Development, and Human Rights 2000

• Read the Report in French

Snouts in the Trough: Export Credit Agencies, Corporate Welfare and Policy Incoherence 1999 By Nicholas Hilyard of The Corner House.

Turning up the Heat on Export Credit Agencies From Development Today November 16, 1998. By Heffa Schucking of Urgewald.