Text presented at the 19ª Asamblea Anual del Grupo Regional de América Latina y el Caribe (GRULAC), of the World Savings Banks Institute, La Habana, Cuba, 4-5 November 2013. It mentions some of the more recent international reform initiatives in particular those linked to the Basel Committee...

Standards and the global framework. The BIS as host of standard setting bodies. Legal impact of standards.

Using data from 11 EU countries, the paper investigates the impact of scale economies on labour productivity in European business services. Moreover, it analyses whether the incidence of scale sub-optimality is related to characteristics of the market or to national regulation characteristics....

The paper investigates whether scale effects, market structure, and regulation determine the poor productivity performance of the European business services industry. We apply parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate the productivity frontier and subsequently explain the distance of...