As the global financial crisis has shown, regulatory agencies can at times spectacularly fail to fulfil their regulatory mandates. Yet, the conditions under which governments respond to regulatory failures by terminating and replacing their regulatory agencies have so far remained largely...

This paper summarizes the results of a survey of financial supervisory agencies in IMF member countries conducted in 2007. Responses were received from 140 financial sector supervisors in 103 countries. A majority of these are separate stand-alone agencies, though, a majority of bank supervisors...