Banks ’ support for the development of internationalization in Brazil: a perspective from Brazilian export companies

Purpose – Banks play a crucial role in the sustainable development of exports as they finance much of the trade. Additionally, in Brazil ’ s case, banks provide exporting companies with advisory and training services, whichfacilitatetheinternationalizationprocess.ThisworkaimstoanalyzetheroleofpublicandprivatebanksintheexportprocessofcompaniesinBrazil. Design/methodology/approach – Interviews are conducted with a sample of 318 Brazilian exporting companies.Two research questionsare posed:What typeof export servicesdo companiesuse from publicand private banks in Brazil? Is exporting companies ’ access to credit, as a type of banking service, related to their size or export experience? A descriptivestudyof the functions of publicand private banksin helping Brazilian exports is presented. Hypotheses are proposed regarding companies ’ access to credit and its relationship with their size and export experience. Findings – It is found that public and private banks in Brazil provide exporting companies with banking services, other services related to technical aspects, and export consulting. There are significant differences in access to credit in both public and private banks, depending on the exporting company ’ s size. Originality/value – This work contributes to the internationalization literature on the role of banks in supporting exports in an emerging country like Brazil.


Introduction
In Brazil, public and private banks play an essential role in companies' entry into international trade, especially by directing credit toward exports (Mettenheim, 2010) as well as coordinating and financing investment projects abroad (Araujo and Cintra, 2011).However, in Brazil, public and private banks perform another series of functions that are not strictly banking to support companies in the exporting of goods and services (Turguttopbas, 2013).Among these functions, we can highlight training for the employees of exporting companies and the provision of support in technical aspects, using the banks' expert knowledge in the export areas, among other types of aid.This support facilitates the internationalization process of Brazilian companies, especially those that could have more significant deficiencies in the human or relational capital that is necessary to achieve proper export levels.Furthermore, banks' relationship with exporting companies may vary depending on the companies' internationalization strategies (Petridou et al., 2007) or export behavior (Osarenkhoe, 2009).From these arguments, two research questions arise related to the use of the services offered by banks to exporting companies in Brazil.
RQ1.What type of export services do companies use from public and private banks in Brazil?
RQ2.Is exporting companies' access to credit, as a distinct type of banking service, related to their size or export experience?
Therefore, this work aims to analyze the use of services that banks offer to companies as export support.It contributes to the company internationalization literature regarding banks' role in the development of international trade in emerging countries (Ahmad, 2013).This aspect is essential since the sustainable development of international trade is primarily based on the support of the agents involved in this process.In the case of the banking sector, the facilitation of credit for foreign trade is especially significant since much of the trade is financed by banks (St-Pierre et al., 2018).As Lundberg (2019) pointed out, the higher the export performance, the greater the importance attributed to bank financing of international business.Furthermore, in emerging countries, financial crises primarily affect exports (Jaud et al., 2018).The empirical work is carried out on a sample of 318 Brazilian exporting companies.Brazil is a country with significant leadership in Mercosurthe Southern Common Market (Moncarz et al., 2016) is a regional integration process initially instituted by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay and later joined by Venezuela and Bolivia, the latter in the process of accession, with particular importance in agriculture and livestock business (Wen et al., 2019).Furthermore, this work is attractive due to the particular functions performed by banks in Brazil.These functions subscribe to written banking services and cover a broader set of support for exports.

Banks' support for the internationalization of companies in Brazil
Financial development, which is understood as the ability of the financial institutions in a country or region to arrange the provision of services by economic agents to facilitate and intensify transactions between agents (Matos, 2002), is the key to countries' economic development (Pagano, 1993;Raghutla and Chittedi, 2020).The importance of the financial system in the economy is based on five fundamental premises (Levine, 1997): (1) Offering protection, diversification or risk combination arrangements faced by economic agents.
(3) Monitoring and managing the control of companies.
(5) Facilitating the exchange of goods and services in a market economy.
If reference is made to the growth of exports, the importance of financial development is reflected in two aspects (Beck, 2002): (1) countries with a more developed financial system have greater participation of manufactured exports in the balance of payments; and (2) economies have an advantage in sectors with high economies of scale.In this sense, financial services can be interpreted as being part of production technology.Financial development affects the structure of trade.Therefore, the degree of financial development and the way in EJMS 26,2/3 which this influences the level of trade reached by companies are the key to understanding their internationalization level.Huang and Temple (2005) found positive relationships between trade openness and financial development in countries that are open to capital flows, like Brazil.Do and Levchenko (2006) argued that, in countries that are richly endowed with physical capital and specialize in capital-intensive industries, as is the case of exporting companies, for example, the demand for good financial intermediation drives the development of the financial system.The Brazilian banking system is structured in large segments.On the one hand, banking institutions are understood as the group formed by commercial banks, banks of credit, credit unions and multiple banks.On the other hand, there are the institutions operating in other areas of the financial market: development banks, investment banks, credit companies, finance and investment companies, leasing companies, and real estate credit companies, among others.
In Brazil, private banks predominate numerically, but public banks exercise the most prominent role in financing export activity.In Brazil, public credit plays a crucial role in supporting companies, with state banks accounting for almost half of the outstanding credit (Maffioli et al., 2017).
Public credit programs aim to reduce credit restrictions, increase competitiveness and create jobs for small and medium-sized businesses.It is within the powers of the state to give guarantees and advantages to public banks.Public banks, by their nature, have a responsibility to support the development of the regional economy (Cintra, 2009;Freitas, 2010;Araujo and Cintra, 2011).With their financing lines, they offer credit and financial services to companies in the commercial sphere, especially to small and medium-sized companies, in the country and for regional support development (Baas and Schrooten, 2005;H€ over, 2009).Private banks, on the other hand, can choose the loan strategies that they consider to be the most appropriate (Matthey, 2008).
From the perspective of exporting companies, the lack of financial and human resources, knowledge of external markets and experience in conducting business abroad are among the main internal barriers to internationalization (Formisano et al., 2020).In this situation, banks, both public and private, can overcome these barriers (Turguttopbas, 2013).Banks can offer information and knowledge as well as financial support to exporting companies (Diniz, 1998), especially micro-companies that have more difficulties in accessing export credit (Motta, 2020).

Objectives and hypotheses
This research's general objective is to analyze Brazilian exporting companies' use of the export services provided by banks.To deepen this objective and answer the research questions, four specific research objectives and two hypotheses are set.
The first objective is to identify the institutions or other types of resources that companies access to obtain information or request help to resolve doubts or solve problems with the export process.The second objective is to understand Brazilian exporting companies' use of the different types of export support provided by public and private banks.The third objective is to examine Brazilian exporting companies' use of export credit provided by both public and private banks.The fourth objective is to analyze the relationship between access to credit from public and private banks and characteristics that identify exporting companies.To address the fourth objective, two research hypotheses are proposed.
In general terms, the literature has pointed out that small and medium-sized companies have more difficulties in accessing credit (Campello et al., 2012), especially in emerging Brazilian export companies countries such as Brazil (Makler et al., 2013).As part of the Brazilian Government's strategy, small and medium-sized companies have more access to credit facilities.Public banks especially support access to credit for this type of company (Maffioli et al., 2017).Additionally, large companies with more significant credit guarantees can more easily avail themselves of credit from private banks.Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed: H1.There are significant differences in the degrees of access to credit from public banks and private banks according to differences in exporting companies' size.
Learning is vital in export processes (Mostafiz et al., 2020) as it generates knowledge for the development of export performance (Di Fatta et al., 2019), for example due to a greater understanding of the functioning of foreign markets (Wang and Olsen, 2002).The literature has indicated the role of experience as one of the primary sources of learning in developing internationalization activities (Casillas et al., 2015;Johanson and Vahlne, 1990).Experience helps companies to test their initial expectations against reality and provides information on the operation details of the process, for example the characteristics of the product that are valued by foreign customers and the development of new routines and processes for operations abroad (Casillas et al., 2020).Furthermore, access to credit, as one of the most certain services in the export process, is related to companies' export behavior (Bernhardt, 2017) and export experience (Okafor et al., 2020).Export experience reduces the probability that exporting companies will exit export markets (Inui et al., 2017).Therefore, a relationship is expected between export experience and access to credit, and the following hypothesis is proposed: H2.There are significant differences in the degrees of access to credit from public banks and private banks according to differences in companies' export experience.

Instrument and procedure
The instrument used to collect information is an ad hoc questionnaire concerning Brazilian companies' internationalization process (see Appendix).The questionnaire employs an 11-point Likert scale, on which 0 corresponds to total disagreement with the statement and 10 corresponds to total agreement with the statement.The Likert scale is used to measure experts' opinions on the internationalization of companies in Brazil.The range of 11 points aims to capture the wide dispersion of the responses.
Once the questionnaire had been prepared, and before sending it to all the individuals who appeared in the Catalog of Exporters of the Ministry of Development, Industry, and Commerce of Brazil (MDIC), a pretest was carried out to ensure that it was appropriate.The questionnaire was sent via the internet to those responsible for the companies' export area, as this was considered to be the most direct way of obtaining the data that we sought.The questionnaire's design is based on an expansion of reasons indicated to be related to the theoretical approach.
The questionnaire addresses aspects related to exports in Brazil.It consists of three parts.In the first, companies' characteristics are identified, among other aspects their size and location; the second investigates companies' exporting behavior; and the third concerns the development of the export process.
To identify the export aid institutions, a rigorous search was undertaken of the export agents and means that are available to exporting companies (e.g.Cunha et al., 2012).This search resulted in six agents and resource export aid, customs agents, the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade (MDIC), and the Ministry of Foreign Relations (MRE).The Agência Brasileira de Promoção de Exportações e Investimentos (Brazilian EJMS 26,2/3 Trade and Investment Promotion Agency -Apex-Brasil) offers private consulting in international trade and banking for foreign trade.
To propose the different services offered by banks as export support, an analysis of the literature related to banks in Brazil was carried out (Asunci on, 2013; Coutinho and Amaral, 2004); this analysis identified seven types of services that Brazilian banks could deliver to companies as export aid: financial, technological, tax, consulting, training in foreign trade, business training and market research.

Sample
The sample was taken in 2012 from the database of the Catalog of Brazilian Exporters (CEB), which offers information on exports extracted from the official records of the Secretaria Especial de Com ercio Exterior e Assuntos Internacionais (Special Secretariat for Foreign Trade and International Affairs-SECEX), part of the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, which has been called Ministry of Economy since 2019 (see Table 1).
The sample is made up of 318 companies from the five geographic regions of the country.The table indicates the characteristics of the sample and of the population regarding the variables for which information was collected, such as the companies' size and region of origin.A comparison of the two magnitudes makes it possible to verify the significance of the sample.
In relation to the size of the sample companies, 22.6% are considered to be micro companies, 24.9% small companies, 30.8% medium-sized companies and the remaining 21.7% large companies.In the population, 23.7% are considered to be micro companies, 21.4% small companies, 30.7% medium-sized companies, and the remaining 24.2% large

Characteristics of the sample of companies
Brazilian export companies companies.For the classification of companies according to size, the São Paulo Chamber of Commerce guidelines, which classify size according to the volume of business and the number of employees, were followed.
Regarding regions, of the sample companies, 25.7% are from the south, 5.9% are from the northeast, 57.2% are from the southwest, 3.8% are from the north and 7.4% are from the central east.In the population, 27.3% are from the south, 6.4% are from the northeast, 59.0% are from the southwest, 3.2% are from the north and 4.1% are from the central east.
In relation to the sector, 23.0% of companies are agribusinesses, 3.8% operate in the extractive industry, 56.3% work in the transformative industry and 16.9% are services.
Regarding the number of years of exporting, 42.8% reported less than 10 years, 39.3% have been exporting for 10-19 years, and the lowest percentage, 17.9%, refers to companies that have been exporting for more than 19 years.

Descriptive analysis results
Table 2 displays the percentages of use by Brazilian exporting companies of the resources that are made available by public institutions through the internet as well as by companies specializing in international trade and public and private banks.
As shown in Table 2, 86.8% of Brazilian exporting companies request help from customs agents in the case of exports, and 52.2% of exporting companies use their bank to solve their export problems.This percentage is followed by 49.4% of companies indicating the use of a private consultancy, 34.7% making use of the MDIC (2014) Website, and 22.0% reporting the use of the Apex-Brasil website, provided by the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency, a governmental organization that promotes Brazilian products and services abroad and attracts foreign direct investment (FDI) to strategic sectors of the Brazilian economy; lastly, 11.0% used the MRE website (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil).
Table 3  As Table 3 indicates, with reference to public banking, on a Likert scale from 0 to 10, the type of support that is most frequently used is financial (5.38), followed by training in foreign trade (3.58) and consulting (2.24); the least popular support services are aid for business promotion (1.99) and market research (2.00).With regard to private banking, the most demanded type of support is financial services (4.48), followed by consulting (2.78) and training in foreign trade (2.73); the least demanded services are trade promotion (1.75) and market research (1.95).Comparing the results by type of bank, it is apparent that, in all cases, public banking provides more support for exports than private banking.
Table 4 presents a descriptive analysis of Brazilian companies' access to export credit from both public banking and private banking.
As can be seen in Table 4, on a Likert scale from 0 to 10 points, access to credit through public banking (4.77) receives a higher score than access to credit through private banking (3.68).

Results of the analysis of variance
The results of the ANOVA are presented below to elucidate the two proposed hypotheses further.Table 5 presents an analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) related to the first hypothesis regarding Brazilian exporting companies' access to credit based on the ownership of the bank chosen for exports.In this ANOVA, the company (micro, small, medium or large) is taken as an independent variable and the use of credit granted by public banking and private banking is the dependent variable.
As can be observed in Table 5, there are significant differences in the use of both public (p 5 0.022) and private banks (p 5 0.000), so hypothesis 1 is accepted.Besides, Table 5 indicates the mean on a Likert scale from 0 to 10 in which access to credit from a public bank is valued by size; the lowest mean corresponds to microenterprises (4.33) and the highest mean relates to small and large companies (4.69 and 5.58, respectively).With regard to credit from private banks, the mean of 3.68, the lowest mean, corresponds to microenterprises (2.22) and the highest averages refer to median and large companies (3.89 and 4.43, respectively).Therefore, in access to credit through both public and private banks, the least valued are micro enterprises.
Comparing the type of company and access to credit in public and private banking, we can see that there is greater access in public banking than in private banking in all cases.In particular, this difference is more pronounced for micro companies (2.44 in public banking compared with 2.22 in private banking) and for large companies (5.58 in public banking versus 4.43 in private banking).
Table 6 presents an ANOVA related to the use of credit in public banking and private banking according to the export experience of the company measured through the years of exporting.
As Table 6 indicates, no significant differences were found in relation to public banking (p 5 0.254) or private banking (p 5 0.664); therefore, Hypothesis 2 is rejected.
Table 6 also presents the descriptive statistics of access to credit according to the companies' exporting experience.In this table, no significant differences are observable in the data, the means being similar in each of the ranges of export years.However, suppose that a   6.ANOVA of a factor and descriptive statistics according to years exporting and use of public and private banking Brazilian export companies comparative analysis is undertaken between access to credit by years of experience and public and private banking.In that case, it is apparent that companies with less experience have greater access to public credit: (1) in the case of 1-9 years of experience, the score is 4.90 for public banking and 3.82 for private banking; (2) for 10-19 years of experience, it is 4.86 for public banking and 3.52 for private banking; (3) for more experience, access to private banking is more remarkable than access to public banking (4.77 and 3.68, respectively).

Conclusions
This work had the general objective of analyzing the types of support that publicly owned and privately owned banks provide to Brazilian exporting companies.In this sense, the banks in Brazil carry out a set of functions to help companies internationalize beyond the strict financial functions of banking activity.Therefore, knowledge of this reality, which may be common in developing countries, is of particular interest.Sometimes developing countries do not have sufficient government infrastructure to support exports (Hammarlund and Anderson, 2019), and it is the banks that perform these functions.Accordingly, it has been verified that banks offer banking products to meet exporting companies' needs.However, they also provide companies with other types of services, such as foreign exchange and foreign trade consulting and international business training, as well as marketing facilitation of products and services for exporting.
Some important conclusions can be drawn from the empirical results.As has been verified, Brazilian exporting companies use the services of banks to overcome their difficulties in exporting; in addition, when companies were asked about the type of resources or institutions that they use as support for exporting, more than half of the companies indicated that their primary support is provided by the bank chosen for exports, and this percentage is higher than that of private consultancy or the Government's online services.This first result is significant regarding banks' support for exporting companies.
Having revealed this, the study attempted to determine the type of aid or specific services that banks offer to exporting companies.Thus, banks in Brazil were found to provide an essential set of financial and non-financial services.As stated in the theoretical framework, companies use numerous banking services, both financial and nonfinancial.However, as expected, the services that received the highest scores are financial services from publicly owned banks.
Nevertheless, functions such as consulting or training received high marks, which corroborate the statement made in the introduction that banks in a developing country like Brazil "assume" certain functions that in developed countries would be performed by development banks, Exim banks for instance, used mainly by developed countries or by public administrations or even by other types of corporate entities.Another essential aspect to highlight is that public banks received a higher score for each type of support.In a way, these results could be consistent with the previous results because, in developing countries, more significant public infrastructure could be needed to attend to the export needs of companies, obviously appropriate to each type of product/service and the size of the company.In a sense, through their relational capital, banks promote networks between exporting companies, which are critical to developing exports (Felzensztein et al., 2015).
These results are in line with those of authors such as Mettenheim (2010), who pointed out that, in economies with underdeveloped capital markets, it is common to use development financial institutions, generally constituted in the form of public banks, which operate with directed credit.Moreover, the interest rates are lower than those available in the market, allowing companies to access resources that allow the constitution of longer-term liabilities appropriate to the asset structures and thus enabling the expansion of investments.From this perspective, public and development banks play an important and sometimes crucial role in EJMS 26,2/3 financing and coordinating investment projects, reducing their risks (Araujo and Cintra, 2011).Accordingly, it could be indicated that banks, both public and private, help companies in Brazil to overcome specific barriers to exports, especially barriers to credit and some barriers related to possible deficiencies in their human capital (Kahiya, 2017).
We sought to determine the extent to which exporting companies use banking support to access credit.We proved that, as the literature has indicated (Lundberg, 2019), companies need credit for their export activities.As in the previous case, companies make greater use of credit from public banks than from private banks, strengthening the above proposal, which pointed out the critical role that public banks play in developing countries.
The first hypothesis suggested differences in access to credit according to company size (Contin-Pilart et al., 2020).The study showed that there are significant differences according to company size in access to credit in both public and private banking.These results follow the literature, which has indicated that a company's size is a key variable in the export process (Gerschewski et al., 2020).Bekteshi's (2020) work verified that a company's size is positively and significantly related to its export performance, which indicates the importance of economies of scale in the development of exports, particularly in access to credit (Okafor et al., 2020).The descriptive analysis that was carried out made it possible to verify that companies in Brazil have greater access to credit through public banking than through private banking.It was primarily found that micro and large companies are the most prominent in the use of credit from public banking.This may be due to the function and characteristics of public banking.On the one hand, public banks serve the most vulnerable companies (Villar et al., 2016), and, on the other hand, they assume more risks from large companies that need a more significant contribution of credit.
Two other hypotheses analyzed the relationship between access to credit and companies' export experience.It was proposed that companies with more significant export experience could have greater access to credit, for example due to a learning effect (Ledesma-Chaves et al., 2020).However, no differences were found, and access to credit was not shown to be related to experience.This result may be because the export planning process does not cover many years, although this requires empirical confirmation.
This study sheds light on the need for more significant support for exporting from banks, whether of private or of public origin, especially in countries where essential economic activities are strongly related to exports.This is the case of Brazil, a country that engages heavily in agribusiness exports.The need for more generous support for export activity is evident in the results found concerning both access to credit and access to new markets.

Limitations and lines of research
This work makes significant contributions to the literature on internationalization, especially the study of emerging countries and their peculiarities concerning the role that banks play in the process of entering foreign markets.However, these are substantially descriptive and comparative analyses.In subsequent investigations, causal analyses could be carried out to explain companies' export capacity in Brazil through export agents.Also, delve into the relationships between banking services and the needs of companies, and learn about the relationships between the financial and productive sectors (Cardao-Pito, 2020).

Table 2 .
presents a descriptive analysis of the different types of export support that Brazilian companies use from both public banking and private banking.Resources towards export