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 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 authors contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth, and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993-2000 on 49 nations....

The postwar experience of the Japanese banking system has received considerable attention recently partly because conditions in defeated Japan in 1945 (including high inflation and the need to switch from a military to a civilian economy) are similar to those in transition economies today....

Canada and the United States are probably as similar as any two countries in the world, but they have always had very different banking systems. First, the United States has had a unit banking system due to the restrictions on branch banking, which created many small banks. Canada, however, has...

Few areas of the world have escaped significant losses from episodes of bank insolvency. Bank insolvency is more costly in the developing world, where losses represent a greater share of income. The authors present data on bank insolvency episodes since the late 1970s. This new database can be...

Increasing foreign participation and high concentration levels characterize the recent evolution of banking sectors'market structures in developing countries. The authors analyze the impact of these factors on Latin American bank spreads during the late 1990s. Their results suggest that foreign...

The author proposes a new approach to explain why the costs of crisis are greater in some countries than in others. He begins with the premise that many crises result from the willingness of politicians to cater to special interests, at the expense of broad social interests. A parsimonious model...

The authors examine the impact of bank supervision on the financing obstacles faced by almost 5,000 corporations across 49 countries. They find that firms in countries with strong official supervisory agencies that directly monitor banks tend to face greater financing obstacles. Moreover,...

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...