Beattie: Trade recovery fragile..

The (ICC) report focused on trade finance - the form of credit which, in effect, insures against the importer crashing while goods are in transit - whose price rose sharply in 2008 as the global financial crisis took hold.

Amid fears that the machinery of world trade would seize up, multilateral development banks, including the World Bank, launched lending programmes to try to catalyse a revival in trade credit.

"The costs of trade finance remain substantially higher than they were pre-crisis, raising the problem of affordability for exporters," the chamber said. Some 30 per cent of respondents indicated an increase in fees for commercial letters of credit and other instruments.

Banks said customers were requiring higher levels of insurance when dealing with their trading partners - demanding confirmed letters of credit rather than taking payments more on trust...