Publication:
The Evolving Importance of Banks and Securities Markets

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (1.04 MB)
1,399 downloads
English Text (91.57 KB)
126 downloads
Date
2011-09-01
ISSN
Published
2011-09-01
Author(s)
Feyen, Erik
Levine, Ross
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper examines the evolving importance of banks and securities markets during the process of economic development. As economies develop, they increase their demand for the services provided by securities markets relative to those provided by banks, such that securities markets become increasingly important for future economic development. Some exploratory evidence further suggests that deviations of a country s actual financial structure -- the mixture of banks and markets operating in an economy -- from the estimated optimal structure are associated with lower levels of economic activity.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Feyen, Erik; Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Levine, Ross. 2011. The Evolving Importance of Banks and Securities Markets. Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 5805. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3611 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Geopolitics and the World Trading System
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Mattoo, Aaditya; Ruta, Michele; Staiger, Robert W.
    Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel
    Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
  • Publication
    Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22) Middelanis, Robin; Jafino, Bramka Arga; Hill, Ruth; Nguyen, Minh Cong; Hallegatte, Stephane
    Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
  • Publication
    From Patriarchy to Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Bussolo, Maurizio; Rexer, Jonah M.; Hu, Lynn
    Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    The Evolving Importance of Banks and Securities Markets
    (Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2013-09) Feyen, Erik; Demirgüç-Kunt, Asli; Levine, Ross
    The roles of banks and securities markets evolve during the process of economic development. As countries develop economically, (1) the size of both banks and securities markets increases relative to the size of the economy, (2) the association between an increase in economic output and an increase in bank development becomes smaller, and (3) the association between an increase in economic output and an increase in securities market development becomes larger. These findings are consistent with theories predicting that as economies develop, the services provided by securities markets become more important for economic activity, whereas those provided by banks become less important.
  • Publication
    Financial Development : Structure and Dynamics
    (2011-10-01) Feyen, Erik; de la Torre, Augusto; Ize, Alain
    This paper analyzes the bright and dark sides of the financial development process through the lenses of the four fundamental frictions to which agents are exposed -- information asymmetry, enforcement, collective action, and collective cognition. Financial development is shaped by the efforts of market participants to grind down or circumvent these frictions, a process further spurred by financial innovation and scale and network effects. The analysis leads to broad predictions regarding the sequencing and convexity of the dynamic paths for a battery of financial development indicators. The method used also yields a robust way to benchmark the financial development paths followed by individual countries or regions. The paper explores the reasons for path deviations and gaps relative to the benchmark. Demand-related effects (past output growth), financial crashes, and supply-related effects (the quality of the enabling environment) all play an important role. Informational frictions are easier to overcome than contractual frictions, not least because of the transferability of financial innovation across borders.
  • Publication
    Benchmarking Financial Development
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06) Feyen, Erik; Beck, Thorsten; Moizeszowicz, Florencia; Ize, Alain
    Capitalizing on recent improvements in the availability of cross-country financial sector data, this paper proposes a standard methodology for benchmarking the policy component of financial development. Systematic controls are introduced to isolate main structural country characteristics and a principal components analysis is used to help identify a parsimonious set of ten "core" outcome indicators from a broader set of twenty seven potential indicators covering different dimensions of development in both financial institutions and financial markets. Such a broad-based approach helps reveal important determinants and regularities of the process of financial development. The paper also identifies some of the main data gaps that will need to be filled to allow further progress in financial benchmarking looking forward.
  • Publication
    Global Liquidity and External Bond Issuance in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-07) Feyen, Erik; Ghosh, Swati; Kibuuka, Katie; Farazi, Subika
    Using the universe of all externally issued bonds by corporates and sovereigns in emerging and developing economies during 2000-14, this paper analyzes various issuance trends, including the unprecedented post-crisis surge. The paper focuses on external issuance at the country-industry and individual bond levels and finds that global factors matter greatly for emerging and developing economies issuance. A decrease in U.S. expected equity market (or interest rate) volatility, U.S. corporate credit spreads, and U.S. interbank funding costs and an increase in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet (i) raise the odds that the monthly issuance volume of a country-industry is above its historical average; (ii) decrease individual bond yields and spreads; and (iii) raise bond maturities, after controlling for country pull factors, bond characteristics (for example, type of issuer, industry, and riskiness). Additionally, we document support that the risk-taking channel of exchange rate appreciation also operates for external bond issuance. Moreover, while the paper finds that country pull factors affect the impact of global factors, it does not find consistent evidence for this across the board. This result suggests that, during loose global funding conditions, flows are mostly driven by push factors and do not systematically discriminate between emerging and developing economies. Taken together, the findings suggest that although issuers might be able to benefit from benign international funding conditions, the large issuance volumes, currency risks, and high exposure to global factors could pose external and domestic challenges for policy makers, particularly when global cycles reverse.
  • Publication
    World Bank South Asia Economic Update 2010 : Moving Up, Looking East
    (World Bank, 2010) World Bank
    South Asia's rebound since March 2009 has been strong and is comparable to that in East Asia. South Asia is poised to grow by about 7 percent in 2010 and nearly 8 percent in 2011, thanks to the strong recovery in India, good performances in Bangladesh, post-conflict bounce in Sri Lanka, recovery in Pakistan, and turnarounds in other countries, including Afghanistan, Maldives, and Nepal. The region's prospective growth is close to pre-crisis peak levels and faster than the high rates of the early part of the decade (6.5 percent annually from 2000 to 2007). The recovery is being led by rising domestic confidence and is balanced in terms of domestic versus external demand, consumption versus investment, and private demand versus reliance on stimulus. Government policy, external support, resumption of private spending, and global recovery are driving the rebound. Strong government fiscal and monetary stimulus packages and, in some cases, external assistance are helping stimulate recovery. Improved optimism is helping the recovery in private spending in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka. World trade and demand recovery are also supporting the rebound in exports and tourism, as are capital inflows. Not everyone is doing equally well, with slower recovery in countries with weaker fundamentals, those with unresolved conflict or post-conflict issues, and those that were heavily exposed to the global downturn (Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan). Some significant risks are ahead in the global environment, slowing worker remittances and exports in a still hesitant and uncertain global recovery (which recent events in Europe have highlighted), volatile commodity prices, and continuing volatility in global capital flows.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Doing Business 2014 : Understanding Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises
    (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2013-10-28) World Bank; International Finance Corporation
    Eleventh in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 185 economies, Doing Business 2014 measures regulations affecting 11 areas of everyday business activity: Starting a business, Dealing with construction permits, Getting electricity, Registering property, Getting credit, Protecting investors, Paying taxes, Trading across borders, Enforcing contracts, Closing a business, Employing workers. The report updates all indicators as of June 1, 2013, ranks economies on their overall “ease of doing business”, and analyzes reforms to business regulation – identifying which economies are strengthening their business environment the most. The Doing Business reports illustrate how reforms in business regulations are being used to analyze economic outcomes for domestic entrepreneurs and for the wider economy. Doing Business is a flagship product by the World Bank and IFC that garners worldwide attention on regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. More than 60 economies use the Doing Business indicators to shape reform agendas and monitor improvements on the ground. In addition, the Doing Business data has generated over 870 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals since its inception.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2011
    (World Bank, 2011) World Bank
    The 2011 World development report looks across disciplines and experiences drawn from around the world to offer some ideas and practical recommendations on how to move beyond conflict and fragility and secure development. The key messages are important for all countries-low, middle, and high income-as well as for regional and global institutions: first, institutional legitimacy is the key to stability. When state institutions do not adequately protect citizens, guard against corruption, or provide access to justice; when markets do not provide job opportunities; or when communities have lost social cohesion-the likelihood of violent conflict increases. Second, investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence. But there are major structural gaps in our collective capabilities to support these areas. Third, confronting this challenge effectively means that institutions need to change. International agencies and partners from other countries must adapt procedures so they can respond with agility and speed, a longer-term perspective, and greater staying power. Fourth, need to adopt a layered approach. Some problems can be addressed at the country level, but others need to be addressed at a regional level, such as developing markets that integrate insecure areas and pooling resources for building capacity Fifth, in adopting these approaches, need to be aware that the global landscape is changing. Regional institutions and middle income countries are playing a larger role. This means should pay more attention to south-south and south-north exchanges, and to the recent transition experiences of middle income countries.
  • Publication
    World Development Report 2006
    (Washington, DC, 2005) World Bank
    This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.
  • Publication
    Remarks to the Annual Meetings 2020 Development Committee
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10-16) Malpass, David
    David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, announced that the Board approved a fast track approach to emergency health support programs that now covers 111 countries. Most projects are well advanced, with average disbursement upward of 40 percent. The goal is to take broad, fast action early. The operational framework presented back in June has positioned the Bank to help countries address immediate health threats and social and economic impacts and maintain our focus on long-term development. The Bank is making good progress toward the 15-month target of 160 billion dollars in surge financing. Much of it is for the poorest countries and will take the form of grants or low-rate, long-maturity loans. IFC, through the Global Health Platform, will be providing financing to vaccine manufacturers to foster expanded production of COVID-19 vaccines in both part 1 and 2 countries, providing production is reserved for emerging markets. The Development Committee holds a unique place in the international architecture. It is the only global forum in which the Governments of developed countries and the Governments of developing countries, creditor countries and borrower countries, come together to discuss development and the ‘net transfer of resources to developing countries.’ The current International Financial Architecture system is skewed in favor of the rich and creditor countries. It is important that all voices are heard, so Malpass urged the Ministers of developing countries to use their voice and speak their minds today. Malpass urged consideration of how we can build a new approach to debt restructuring that allows for a fair relationship and balance between creditors and debtors. This will be critical in restoring growth in developing countries; and helping reverse the inequality.
  • Publication
    Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21) Luna-Bazaldua, Diego; Levin, Victoria; Liberman, Julia; Gala, Priyal Mukesh
    This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.