The expansion of Spanish banks in Latin America is one of the most important elements of bank internationalisation in recent years. Spanish banks now head the ranking of foreign banks in the region. At first glance, it is paradoxical that at a time of notable progress in the process of European...

2003 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of SUERF. To mark this milestone, some time ago the Council of Management commissioned Professor Jean-Paul Abraham to write a commemorative report. His mandate was not to write a history of SUERF itself (that would be too self-indulgent) but to...

This paper examines the fiscal challenges that the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe (NEW-8) are facing that arise from both EU membership and from developments that are essentially independent of EU membership. While the direct fiscal strains caused by EU membership may appear...

1) Deposit Insurance in Theory and Practice by Richard Dale. 2) Lending of Last Resort and Systemic Stability in the Eurozone by Christian de Boissieu and Franco Bruni. The first paper overviews theoretical arguments for and against deposit insurance, a system that can be aimed at consumer...

This paper aims at providing a complete picture of banking mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Europe during the 1990s and at offering economic evaluation and strategic analyses of the process. The main characteristics of this process in the 1990s were the emergence of " mega banks" at the...

An increasing number of countries have adopted inflation targeting since New Zealand first adopted this framework in early 1990. Currently there are 21 countries using inflation targeting in every continent of the world. This paper discusses the characteristics of these countries and how the...

1) Financing Firms in East European Countries: An Asymmetric Information and Agency Costs Approach, by Debora Revoltella 2) Seven Years of Financial Market Reform in Central Europe, by Peter H. Haiss and Gerhard Fink.

All aspects of banking business are being radically transformed and to an extent that is changing the fundamental economics of the banking firm and the banking industry. This is because of three dominant factors: a series of powerful pressures acting simultaneously; technology is changing the...

We examine whether the European settlement institutions are technically efficient. This is done by means of estimating a translog cost function, and investigating whether scale economies are fully exploited. Since the sample is quite heterogeneous, fixed effects regression is introduced. From...