This new database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time unites a range of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets.

How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification model of financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for the years 1974 and 2004. It is then used to study the international data, using cross-country interest-rate spreads and per-capita GDP. The analysis suggests that a country like Uganda could increase its output by 140 to 180 percent if it could adopt the world's best practice in the financial sector. Still, this amounts to only 34 to 40 percent of the gap between Uganda's potential and actual output. Charts and tables.

Over a decade has passed since the collapse of the U.S. investment bank, Lehman Brothers, marked the onset of the largest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis revealed major shortcomings in market discipline, regulation and supervision, and reopened important policy debates on financial regulation. Since the onset of the crisis, emphasis has been placed on better regulation of banking systems and on enhancing the tools available to supervisory agencies to oversee banks and intervene speedily in case of distress. Drawing on ten years of data and analysis, Global Financial Development Report 2019/2020 provides evidence on the regulatory remedies adopted to prevent future financial troubles, and sheds light on important policy concerns. To what extent are regulatory reforms designed with high-income countries in mind appropriate for developing countries? What has been the impact of reforms on market discipline and bank capital? How should countries balance the political and social demands for a safety net for users of the financial system with potentially severe moral hazard consequences? Are higher capital requirements damaging to the flow of credit? How should capital regulation be designed to improve stability and access? The report provides a synthesis of what we know, as well as areas where more evidence is still needed. Global Financial Development Report 2019/2020 is the fifth in a World Bank series. The accompanying website tracks financial systems in more than 200 economies before, during, and after the global financial crisis (http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/gfdr) and provides information on how banking systems are regulated and supervised around the world (http://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/BRSS).

CD-ROM contains: World Bank data.

This new database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time unites a range of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets.Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine introduce a new database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time.This database is unique in that it unites a variety of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets.It improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks, by introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions, and by presenting measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets.The compiled data permit the construction of financial structure indicators to measure whether, for example, a country's banks are larger, more active, and more efficient than its stock markets.These indicators can then be used to investigate the empirical link between the legal, regulatory, and policy environment and indicators of financial structure. They can also be used to analyze the implications of financial structure for economic growth.Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine describe the sources and construction of, and the intuition behind, different indicators and present descriptive statistics.This paper - a product of Finance, Development Research Group - is part of a broader effort in the group to understand the determinants of financial structure and its importance to economic development. The authors may be contacted at [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected].

This new annual publication from the World Bank Group provides an overview and assessment of financial sector development around the world, with particular attention on medium- and low-income countries.

The second issue in a new series, Global Financial Development Report 2014 takes a step back and re-examines financial inclusion from the perspective of new global datasets and new evidence. It builds on a critical mass of new research and operational work produced by World Bank Group staff as well as outside researchers and contributors.