Countertrade is exchanging goods or services that are paid for, in whole or part, with other goods or services.

There are five main variants of countertrade:

• Barter: Exchange of goods or services directly for other goods or services without the use of money as means of purchase or payment.
• Switch trading: Practice in which one company sells to another its obligation to make a purchase in a given country.
• Counter purchase: Sale of goods and services to a country by a company that promises to make a future purchase of a specific product from the country.
• Buyback: occurs when a firm builds a plant in a country - or supplies technology, equipment, training, or other services to the country and agrees to take a certain percentage of the plant's output as partial payment for the contract.
• Offset: Agreement that a company will offset a hard - currency purchase of an unspecified product from that nation in the future. Agreement by one nation to buy a product from another, subject to the purchase of some or all of the components and raw materials from the buyer of the finished product, or the assembly of such product in the buyer nation.

Extract from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia