Donald Simonson reviews the shift of a large share of the credit market to commercial financial companies during the last decade and asks whether the banks' loss of market share resulted in a loss of efficiency. In every year from 1983 to 1992 business credit at commercial banks. Reasons for...

This paper examines the two crucial factors in Czech banking policy that explain why Czech banks were not an effective support for economic restructuring in the nineties. These factors are: the subsistence of unrestructured, non-viable firms that undermined development of banks' debt monitoring...