The dramatic events of the late 1990s, which followed a wave of financial crises going back to the early 1980s, brought to center stage the issue of financial sector policy in developing countries. Many recent books have presented a chronology and interpretation of the crises, but it is little...

Making Finance Work for Africa presents a coherent policy approach that addresses African priorities and can work in African conditions. It challenges the applicability of some conventional views on a range of issues from securities markets and banking regulation to the organization of...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on how financial sector policy can help the poor. It is often thought that promotion of specialized microfinance institutions is the best or only way forward. However, a strong mainstream financial system is also pro-poor-perhaps even more so: while...