During Myanmar's decade of reforms, financial sector reforms were widely recognized to be a critical underpinning of Myanmar's democratization process, enabling the transition to a more egalitarian, accessible economy. Accordingly, the government developed a program of wide-ranging financial...

This Policy Note focuses on distribution channels, the role they play in product diversification and costs, and how regulation can promote competition in mutual funds (MFs) distribution. In many emerging market economics (EMEs) where both the capital markets and the MFs have reached certain...

The Chinese insurance sector is experiencing rapid growth, posing particular challenges to effective supervision. The sector has been growing by over 20 percent a year and there are ambitious government targets for further development. Many individual, often newer, companies are growing at rates...

The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) has maintained its momentum in regulation and supervision in the face of exceptional growth in scale and increasing complexity of the banking system. Equally, the CBRC has risen to the demands of the international regulatory reform agenda,...

China has made significant progress in financial inclusion. High levels of account penetration, savings, and usage of payments services have been achieved, largely due to extensive branches and access points (particularly a vast network of rural cash withdrawal points), innovations by non-bank...

The survey aims to comprehensively and comparatively analyze how regulators from both developing and developed economies are regulating and supervising online alternative finance activities. The current gap is between the demand for finance by small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) and...

This is an assessment of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC) and, secondarily, of certain self-regulatory organizations (SRO) that participate in the regulation of the capital markets of Thailand. This assessment was conducted in February, 2019 as part of the Financial...

The purpose of this policy note is to present reform options on cabotage liberalization. The goal of cabotage liberalization is to help i) foster more competition in the domestic shipping industry, ii) reduce shipping cost, and iii) improve efficiency, maritime services, and safety standards....

This note outlines barriers to competition in product markets based primarily on the screening of Serbian regulations using the OECD Product Market Regulation methodology and comparison to regulations in the OECD. The note focuses on topics covered by the 2018 OECD-WBG product market regulation...