Grossly inefficient banking systems are one of the major impediments to a rapid and sustained upswing in Europe's emerging market economies (EMEs for short). Although the transition from plan to market necessitates a large-scale re-allocation of domestic capital and easy access to foreign...

In developed market economies, banks and other financial institutions perform a variety of vital tasks: they mobilise savings and allocate funds to the optimal uses, they pool investment risks, they exploit scale economies in the evaluation and monitoring of borrowers, and they match the...