An earlier Policy Research Working Paper (Hennie van Greuning, Joselito Gallardo, and Bikki Randhawa,"A Framework for Regulating Microfinance Institutions,"WPS 2061, February 1999) presented a regulatory framework that identifies thresholds in financial intermediation activities that trigger a...

In developing countries, the evolution of financial markets and growing disenchantment with directed credit programs and bank-by-bank credit ceilings have increased the interest in examining and moving to indirect methods of implementing monetary policy. The authors provide an overview of the...

The"conventional wisdom"in academic and policy circles argues that, while large and foreign banks are generally not interested in serving SMEs, small and niche banks have an advantage in doing so because they can overcome SME opaqueness through relationship lending. This paper shows that there...

The financial systems in most developing countries today have many features in common with the financial systems of the developing countries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether they had unlimited liability (as in Scotland in the eighteenth century), or limited liability and...

An appropriate interest rate policy is considered essential to the success of stabilization and adjustment programs that Egypt might undertake. The broad objectives of such a policy would include deregulating credit and investment, raising the interest rate, and developing a"core"short-term debt...

This paper updates the Demirguç-Kunt and Sobaci (2001) cross-country deposit insurance database and extends it in several important dimensions. This new data set identifies both recent adopters and the ones that were not covered earlier due to a lack of data. Moreover, for the first time, it...

Taking the Korean experience as a laboratory experiment in systemic financial crises, the authors analyze distress in individual institutions among two groups of financial intermediaries. They pool together a group of large financial intermediaries (commercial banks, merchant banking...

The authors study the impact of bank concentration, regulations, and national institutions on the likelihood of suffering a systemic banking crisis. Using data on 79 countries over the period 1980-97, they find that crises are less likely (1) in more concentrated banking systems, (2) in...

The 1992 Czechoslavakia mass privatization program involving about 1,500 eneterprises and implemented through a voucher scheme with competitive bidding was a bold step in changing the ownership and governance of a large part of the economy. It represents a clear test case of one approach, and...

Cash prices for wheat in Poland are not closely related to futures prices in Chicago and London, for several reasons: differences in seasonality, fluctuations in exchange rate, poor dissemination of information in Poland, and most important the Polish government's intervention in wheat markets....