The Estonian economy experienced an unusually long business and credit cycle during the first decade of the 21st century. The magnitude of the cycle tested what can be achieved by traditional policy tools and the limits of macro-prudential policies. The country's financial sector, almost fully...

The last several years before the global downturn of 2008-2009 saw rapid credit growth in Poland. The credit-to-gross domestic product ratio rose from about 25 percent in 2004 to close to 50 percent in 2009. Such an expansionitself might potentially be a source of risks to financial stability,...

Although Kenya's financial system is by far the largest and most developed in East Africa and its stability has improved significantly over the past years, many challenges remain. This paper assesses the stability, efficiency, and outreach of Kenya's banking system, usingaggregate, bank-level,...

This paper assesses the extent to which debt overhang poses a constraint to economic activity in Emerging Europe, as the region emerges from the recent financial and economic crisis. At the macroeconomic level, it finds that the external imbalance problem for Emerging Europe has been in most...

Croatia employed macroprudential measures to manage credit growth and capital inflows during the boom years of the 2000s, including reserve requirements on loan growth, a marginal reserve requirement on increases in foreign liabilities, foreign exchange liquidity minima, and elevated capital...

This paper takes stock of the current state of banking systems across Sub-Saharan Africa and discusses recent developments including innovations that might help Africa leapfrog more traditional banking models. Using an array of different data, the paper documents that African banking systems are...

Historically, development banks have been an important instrument of governments to promote economic growth by providing credit and a wide range of advisory and capacity building programs to households, small and medium enterprises, and even large private corporations, whose financial needs are...

This paper presents the latest update of the World Bank Bank Regulation and Supervision Survey, and explores two questions. First, were there significant differences in regulation and supervision between crisis and non-crisis countries? Second, what aspects of regulation and supervision changed...

Past performance of development banks, has generally been considered poor and the value of state ownership questioned. There are few institutions that achieve the optimum balance of effectively addressing a policy objective while being financially sustainable. Following the financial crisis,...

Using firm-level surveys for up to 73 countries, this paper explores the impact of introducing collateral registries for movable assets on firms'access to bank finance. It compares firms'access to bank finance in seven countries that introduced collateral registries for movable assets against...