Despite significant strides in financial development over the past decades, financial dollarization, as reflected in elevated shares of foreign currency deposits and credit in the banking system, remains common in developing economies. We study the impact of financial dollarization,...

The capital markets in Salvador are small and relatively underdeveloped, and have played a very limited role in the economy. On average, institutional investors invest less than 10 percent of their total assets in capital market instruments. In 2009, there were only five new issuances of...

This technical note was prepared in the context of a World Bank Financial Sector Assessment Program mission in the Republic of El Salvador in March 2016. The capital markets in El Salvador continue to remain relatively small but have played a larger role in financing real sector needs in the...

This note was prepared in the context of a World Bank Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) mission in El Salvador in March 2016. Since the last FSAP, the national payments system (NPS) has consolidated and expanded. The real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems owned and operated by the...

Despite significant strides in financial development over the past decades, financial dollarization, as reflected in elevated shares of foreign currency deposits and credit in the banking system, remains common in developing economies. We study the impact of financial dollarization,...

This paper investigates the causes of the "vanishing effect of finance" detected in recent studies. The results highlight that the negative effect of the financial system on growth is mainly driven by advanced economies, whereas finance is still beneficial for income increases in developing...

This paper examines the relationship between changes in the financial sector and the increasing inequality in Germany. For this, first an overview about the development of the main inequality indicators for Germany is given, which show inequality has been rising since the 1980s. Thereafter, the...