Alternatively, many American pharmaceutical companies have moved some clinical trials overseas. Benefits of conducting trials abroad include lower costs (in some countries) and the ability to run larger trials in shorter timeframes. Critics have argued that clinical trials performed outside the U.S. allow companies to avoid many of the FDA’s regulations, since the FDA audits these trials less frequently than U.S. studies. For drug applications approved by the FDA in 2008, 0.7 percent of foreign clinical study sites were audited by the FDA compared to 1.9 percent domestically. Other criticisms of foreign clinical studies, especially in developing countries, relate to the rights and welfare of study participants, integrity of study data, and relevance of data to the U.S. population.