Banking Strategy and Financial Exclusion : Tracing the Pathways of Globalization

This paper argues that the current world-wide scenario of liberalized banking and financial exclusion has emerged because of two successive phases of financial globalization: a macro-scale globalization beginning in the late 1970s and persisting two decades; and a micro-scale globalization - that is, the movement across borders of banking firms and banking practices - beginning in the late 1980s and still gathering force. Contrary to those who view micro-scale globalization as shifting formerly sheltered national banking systems toward efficiency, this paper argues that micro-scale globalization is generating both financial inclusion for the privileged and financial exclusion for the poor or working poor. That is, the micro-scale globalization processes move not only along an efficiency/inefficiency axis, but also along an axis of wealth-equality/opportunity; and moves in the direction of efficiency may force a given economy further from the point of equality of opportunity and wealth