The emphasis of international trade theories shifted in the last forty years, from comparative advantage, to scale economies and product differentiation. More recently, the “new” new trade theories have stressed the role of firm heterogeneity, which has led to a renewed interest on the study of how credit constraints may hamper the export activities of firms. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of the relationship between international trade and finance, a field that only recently has been the subject of systematic analysis in the economic literature, from both a theoretical and empirical point of view. In general, barriers to external financing play a significant role as an obstacle to the exporting activity of firms, especially for younger and smaller firms; and these results would have been reinforced by the global financial crisis.