The author examines the corporate governance of banks. When banks efficiently mobilize and allocate funds, this lowers the cost of capital to firms, boosts capital formation, and stimulates productivity growth. So, weak governance of banks reverberates throughout the economy with negative...

The author examines experiences in Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, and Thailand in confronting systemic financial crises during the 1990s. He draws on the knowledge and experience of World Bank staff who managed the Bank's financial and technical assistance to those countries. In reviewing the...

The authors jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. They argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model."Nonrobustness"checks (which purposely exclude some...

Recent research studying the link between law, and finance has concentrated on country-level investor protection measures, and focused on differences in legal systems across countries, and legal families. The authors extend this literature, and provide a study of firm-level corporate governance...

The authors study the political economy of bank privatization in Argentina. The results of their study strongly support the hypothesis that political incentives affect the likelihood of privatization. They find that: a) provinces whose governors belonged to the fiscally conservative Partido...

The author reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of state ownership. He argues that a gradual transfer of operational control and financial claims over state assets remains the most desirable goal, but it needs to be paced to avoid regulatory capture, and the capture of the...

The government of Hungary has contained the main fiscal risks of the transition to a market economy. It has paid off and resolved most problems in the banking and enterprise sectors. Since 1995 it has implemented fiscal adjustment with the objective of long-term fiscal stability rather than an...

This paper reviews the experience in transacting payments through the commercial banking system, to beneficiaries in Colombia's"Familias en Accion"program. The story told will be useful to those trying to solve the operational problem of moving cash, cost-effectively to large numbers of...

In reforming the financial sector in transition economies, one important debate is whether governments should try to reform existing state-owned banks (the rehabilitation approach) or whether a new private banking system should be allowed to emerge (a new entry approach). Or should there be a...

In recent years, foreign bank participation has increased tremendously in several developing countries. In Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, for example, more than fifty percent of banking assets are now in foreign-controlled banks. In Asia, Africa, The Middle East, and...