.... First, international organizations are viewed as having a certain know-how within specific fields, which gives rise to a power advantage over local firms. The study highlights how networks are constructed to work around rules, inflate contract costs and repatriate funds, and how accounting is implicated...

.... Design/methodology/approach The author draws on multiple streams of literature including: co-location, networks, cooperation and export performance to suggest a series of solid theoretical insights to the literature on SMEs’ export performance, networks and co-location in the Latin American context...