International payment risk management of private small and medium-sized enterprises from a cultural value perspective: A case study in Zhejiang, China

The international financial crisis highlights the payment risk in exporting goods, especially overdue and bad debts by credit risk and transaction exposure by exchange risk. Although risk management against international payment risk has received great attention in both literature and corporate practice, most of them just focus on handling external technical failures rather than building an effective internal risk management culture. With reference to private small and medium-sized enterprises in Zhejiang, one of the most developed export-oriented provinces in China, the paper firstly discusses the negative impact of international financial crisis on payment risk in export sector followed by estimation for post-crisis era, then explores the causes of increased international payment risks from a perspective of cultural values and how the traditional values of private foreign traders in Zhejiang relate to international payment risk and its management. Finally, it puts forward recommendations for private SMEs in international payment risk management during post-crisis era, and concludes that because of the intrinsic role of "culture values" in risk management, private SMEs should put the building of risk management culture in the primary place by circumventing culture comparative disadvantages such as weak risk awareness and using culture comparative advantages such as "Baotuan", etc.