ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses international leasing strategies and decisions from the lessee's perspective and provides decision-making models. The chapter looks at the international lease vs. import decision, providing an evaluation model for decision-making. The advantages of international leasing include among other: it may be the cheapest procedure of obtaining the use of assets; it may offer an additional foreign source of finance; it may provide investors the diversification benefits and it may be used to take advantage of the accounting treatment. By international leasing, the use of an asset is obtained without domestic capital outlay. Many companies, in particular Multinational Corporations adopt a mixed financing strategy with the leasing of some of the facilities which they employ simultaneously to finance their capital investments. Most of the controversy centres around the appropriate method of incorporating into the evaluation of the effects of the implicit debt financing embodied in a lease.
