Financial Liberalisation in India: measuring relative progress

This paper details and analyses aspects of the development of India’s financial sector particularly after 1990 when financial liberalization began, focusing on the ratios of private sector credit to GDP, liquid liabilities of the financial sector to GDP, commercial bank assets to total banking sector assets, and stock market capitalisation to GDP. The Indian evidence shows that though there is a general rise in the trends of all the financial indicators, liquid liabilities and private credit grow particularly slowly after financial liberalization, having stagnated during the 1980s. However, the bank assets and stock market capitalization have shown significant increases during the 1990s. The cross-country analysis shows that Indian performance in the financial sector is slow compared to the high-income and fast growing countries.