How deposit insurance affects financial depth : a cross-country analysis

Should we expect deposit insurance to have a positive effect on development of the financial sector? All insurance pools individual risks: premiums are paid into a fund from which losses are met. In most circumstances, a residual claimant to the fund (typically a private insurance company) loses money when losses exceed premiums. Claimants that underprice risk tend to go bankrupt. With most deposit insurance, however, the residual claimant is a government agency with very different incentives. If the premiums paid by member banks cannot cover current fund expenditures, the taxpayer makes up the shortfall. Facing little threat of insolvency, there is less incentive for administrative agencies to price risk accurately. In the United States, researchers have found that the combination of increasing competition in banking services and underpriced deposit insurance led to riskier banking portfolios without commensurate increases in bank capital. Deposit insurance may facilitate risk-taking, with negative consequences for the health of the financial system. On the positive side, insurance may give depositors increased confidence in the formal financial sector -- which may decrease the likelihood of bank runs and increase financial depth. Indeed, simple bivariate correlations between explicit insurance and financial depth are positive. But when one also controls for income and inflation, that relationship disappears -- in fact, the partial correlation between changes in subsequent financial depth and the adoption of explicit insurance is negative (and quite pronounced). Counterintuitive though it may be, that stylized fact may be partially explained by the political and economic factors that motivated the decision to establish an explicit scheme. The circumstances surrounding decisions about deposit insurance are associated with different movements in subsequent financial depth. Adopting explicit deposit insurance to counteract instability in the financial sector does not appear to solve the problem. The typical reaction to that type of decision has been negative, at least with regard to financial depth in the three years after the program's inception. Adopting explicit deposit insurance when government credibility and institutional development were high appears to have had a positive effect on financial depth.Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Financial Intermediation,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Insurance Law,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation

A hybrid approach to workflow modelling

The increase in Business Process Management projects in the past decade has seen an increase in demand for business process modelling techniques. A rapidly growing aspect of BPM is the use of workflow management systems to automate routine and sequential processes. Workflows tend to move away from traditional definitions of business processes can often be forced to fit a model which does not suit its nature. Existing process modelling tools tend to be biased to either the informational, behavioural or object oriented aspect of the workflow. Because of this, models can often miss important aspects of a workflow. As well as managing the relationship between the types of model it is important to consider who will be using it as process models are useful in various ways. This paper reports on a case study in a manufacturing company where users were surveyed to see which are the notation that are most common in modelling based on two main categories (behavioural and informational). Research outcomes showed that there is no prevailing set of standards used for either of these categories, whilst most user feel the need to use more than one approach to model their system at any given time

Hybrid process modelling within business process management projects

Business Process Management (BPM) is still an important research topic amongst both academics and businesses. The recent recession has forced businesses to focus on cost control and efficiency in order to better cope with the economic downturn. Many companies in this situation turn to BPM software as a means of improving their efficiency and costs by reducing aspects of the business such as process lead-times and material costs. In order to identify areas of the business and its processes which require changing the business will most likely adopt a method of modelling their business processes. Because of the large number of available techniques decision makers usually struggle to decide the best approach. Recent literature has also pointed out that prevalent modelling techniques are designed to serve one specific purpose and may not be capable of modelling the whole picture. The key relationship between the information systems and the human behaviour is one example of where existing techniques are biased towards opposite ends of the scale. This paper proposes the use of a hybrid modelling notation composed of multiple existing notations in order to bridge this. The hybrid notation was applied to a BPM project at a company in the construction industry and a case study conducted with its users

Measuring household usage of financial services : does it matter how or whom You Ask ?

In recent years, the number of surveys of access to and use of financial services has multiplied, but little is known about whether the data generated are comparable across countries, or within the same country over time. This paper reports results from a randomized experiment in Ghana to test whether the identity of the respondent and the inclusion of product-specific cues in questions affect the reported rates of household usage of financial services. The analysis shows that rates of household usage are almost identical when the head reports on behalf of the household and when the rate is tabulated from a full enumeration of household use. Randomly selected informants (i.e., non-heads of the household) provide a less complete summary of household use of financial services than the other two methods. The findings also show that for credit from formal institutions, informal sources of savings, and insurance, usage rates are higher when questions are asked about specific financial products rather than about the respondent’s dealings with types of financial institutions. In short, who is asked the questions and the form in which they are asked both matter.Access to Finance,,Banks&Banking Reform,Housing&Human Habitats,Emerging Markets

World Bank lending and financial sector development

Using a new database of World Bank loans to support financial sector development, the authors investigate whether countries that received such loans experienced more rapid growth on standard indicators of financial development than countries that did not. They account for self-selection with treatment effects regressions, and also use propensity score matching techniques. The authors'results indicate that borrowing countries had significantly more rapid growth in M2/GDP than non-borrowers, and swifter reductions in interest rate spreads and cash holdings (as a share of M2). Borrowers also had higher private credit growth rates than non-borrowers in treatment effects regressions, but not in standard panel regressions with fixed country effects. On the whole, however, the results indicate significant advantages for borrowers over non-borrowers in terms of financial development.

Why privatize? : the case of Argentina's public provincial banks

Argentina has been a leader among developing countries in restructuring its banking sector. The authors analyze the performance of those banks before and after privatization and estimate fiscal savings associated with privatizingArgentina's banks rather than keeping them public and later recapitalizing them. The authors describe the process of privatization, including the creation of residual entities for the assets and liabilities of public provincial banks that private buyers found unattractive and the creation of a special fund (the Fondo Fiduciario) to convert the short-term liabilities of the residual entities into longer-term obligations. They argue that the Fondo, created through cooperation between the Argentine federal government and the World Bank, was key in making privatization of the banks politically feasible. Argentina privatized roughly half of its public provincial banks. The Argentine experience suggests that bank privatization may succeed only when accompanied by a sound, incentive-compatible system of prudential regulation. The regulatory environment affects a bank s solvency. Improved regulation and supervision alone does not deliver the same benefits as improved regulation and supervision with privatization. The provincial banks that remained in the public sector did not demonstrate the same performance gains as privatized provincial banks. The decision to maintain a public provincial bank is a costly one. Policymakers should expect privatization to pass through some or all of the following steps: 1) With respect to pre-privatization audits, expect losses hidden in these banks to be larger than those indicated in prior audits. 2) If residual entities are created, expect them to hold a large share of the old public provincial bank, if the quality of its loan portfolio was low. 3) Do not expect the price paid for the privatized entity (the so-called good bank) to be great, at least compared with assets and liabilities in the residual entity. 4) If the residual entity is large, the province will be confronted with substantial short-term liabilities. But with assistance and an aggressive asset recovery strategy, governments should be able to navigate their way through short-term difficulty. 5) The costs of privatization are less than the costs of future recapitalization, even if the near-term management of the residual entity does not go well.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

The political economy of privatization : an empirical analysis of bank privatization in Argentina

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 Justicialista were more likely to privatize; b) fiscal and economic crises increased the likelihood of privatization; and c) poorly performing banks were more likely to be privatized. They tested the hypotheses for a specific industry in a specific country, making it possible to control for enterprise performance and institutional characteristics. It seems reasonable to expect that similar results might hold in other industries and countries.Banks&Banking Reform,Decentralization,Municipal Financial Management,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Municipal Financial Management,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,National Governance,Housing Finance,Banks&Banking Reform

Job growth and finance : are some financial institutions better suited to early stages of development than others?

This paper combines firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure, and uses two estimation approaches. It finds that in low-income countries, labor growth is swifter in countries with a higher level of private credit/gross domestic product; the positive effect of bank credit is especially pronounced in industries that depend heavily on external finance; and banking development is positively associated with more physical and human capital investment. These findings are consistent with predictions from new structural economics. In high-income countries, labor growth rates are increasing in the level of stock market capitalization, which is also consistent with predictions from new structural economics, although the analysis is unable to provide evidence that the association is causal. It finds no evidence that small-scale firms in low-income countries benefit most from private credit market development. Rather, the labor growth rates of larger, capital-intensive firms increase more with the level of private credit market development, a finding consistent with the history-based political economy view that banking systems in low-income countries serve the interests of the elite, rather than providing broad-based access to financial services.Debt Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,Access to Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Emerging Markets

PURSUING EFFICIENCY WHILE MAINTAINING OUTREACH: BANK PRIVATIZATION IN TANZANIA

Profitability improvements after the privatization of a large state-owned bank might come at the expense of reduced access to financial services for some groups, especially the rural poor. The privatization of Tanzania's National Bank of Commerce provides a unique episode for studying this issue. The bank was split into the "new" National Bank of Commerce, a commercial bank that assumed most of the original bank's assets and liabilities, and the National Microfinance Bank, which assumed most of the branch network and the mandate to foster access to financial services. The new National Bank of Commerce's profitability and portfolio quality improved although credit growth was slow, in line with privatization experiences in other developing countries. Finding a buyer for the National Microfinance Bank proved very difficult, although after years under contract management by private banking consultants, Rabobank of the Netherlands emerged as a purchaser. Profitability has since improved and lending has slowly grown, while the share of non-performing loans remains low.access to banking; access to banking services; access to financial services; access to services; Accounting; Agricultural Bank; asset allocation; asset portfolio; ATMs