"Profitability improvements after the privatization of a large state-owned bank might come at the expense of reduced … access to financial services for some groups, especially the rural poor. The privatization of Tanzania's National Bank of … Commerce provides a unique episode for studying this issue. The bank was split into the "new" National Bank of Commerce, a …

This paper revisits trends in bank privatization and analyzes their economic impact over the past 25 years. Building on … a novel data set of privatization events for 70 developed and developing countries, it shows that bank privatization … smaller in that the fraction of a bank's ownership relinquished during privatization events declined. The majority of …