The report on the Antigua and Barbuda’s Observance of Standards and Codes on Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision is examined. Aggregated assets reported by the offshore banking sector totaled about US$3.0 billion, equivalent in size to about four times the GDP, as on...

The spike in Slovenian inflation in 2007–08 has shown how structural bottlenecks may hamper Slovenian growth in the future. This Selected Issues paper investigates the role of supply factors and demand-side effects in explaining this surge. The paper concludes that the spike in Slovenian...

This technical note presents stress testing of banking and insurance on the Isle of Man (IOM). The stress tests for the IOM Financial Sector Assessment Program Update have been designed to yield as comprehensive and detailed a picture as possible within the constraints of the approach and...

This Technical Note examines the condition of the banking system for Pakistan. The number of commercial banks and various nonbank financial institutions in the country grew rapidly in the early 1990s. The privatization of state-owned banks has been accompanied by the liberalization in the...

This technical note analyzes the competition in the banking sector in Denmark. It reveals that Denmark has a fairly competitive and efficient banking sector. Measured by various indicators, efficiency of banking intermediation has been improving in recent years. The banking sector has become...

Bank profits are high in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) compared to other regions. This paper uses a sample of 389 banks in 41 SSA countries to study the determinants of bank profitability. We find that apart from credit risk, higher returns on assets are associated with larger bank size, activity...

We use bank level data to study the efficiency of banks in Sub-Saharan African middle-income countries and provide possible explanations for the difference in the efficiency levels of banks. We find that banks, on average, could save 20-30 percent of their total costs if they were operating...