Developments in information technology are fundamentally changing many traditional business models. Progress in the IT area is bringing about one change in particular: it is reducing search costs and allowing buyers and sellers of products and services to find each other directly on web-based...

For emerging market regulators, shadow banking represents an activity which they must control. For businessmen in economies like Russia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, shadow banking represents an important business opportunity. By extending credit to risky (but promising) activities...

How can international financial centres like Hong Kong increase assets under management – and thus their size and ranking? Most policymakers and their advisors wrongly answer this question by focusing on financial institutions, and the law that governs them. Instead, policymakers need to start...

Objectives-based legislation – or laws which focus on achieving particular and concrete outcomes – has become a new and important tool that financial sector regulators use to tackle large and varied financial system risks. Yet, objectives-based legislation – and the frequent...

The largest 25 emerging markets (by population size) will need to make about four trillion dollars worth of investments by 2020. What does this mean for investors looking to cash in on the boom in government (and hopefully private) spending on infrastructure? Which markets will generate the most...

Recent price surge in commodity markets has stipulated the intensity of various factors which lead the price volatility. There are multiple-factors namely, traditional supply and demand, excess global liquidity (i.e., monetary inflows in commodity markets), and financialization i.e., financial...

How far do China’s property prices need to drop in order to send the country into a recession? What does this question tell us about the way Bubble Economies work? In this paper, we develop a theory of Bubble Economics – non-linear and often “systemic” (in the mathematical sense of the...

The banks are known as the backbones of any economy. The banks link the saving surplus units with deficit units thereby providing investment and capital formation opportunities to both the units. In the recent times of financial shrinkages and up & down, the banking sector has witnessed various...

We review the empirical evidence on the impact of microcredit on poverty in Bangladesh. Drawing on evidence from seven empirical studies with 306 estimates, we examine the impact of microcredit on three proxies of poverty – income, assets and consumption/expenditure. After addressing issues of...

The study analyses the welfare performance of banks’ lending services in the Ghanaian banking industry with emphasis on the role of market power and efficiency. We made use of pooled OLS regression with fixed effect model. For robustness, we adopted Prais–Winsten (1954) regression and...