مقررات مالی و معماری سیستم مالی در اروپای مرکزی

At the beginning of the transition, advice to Central European countries with respect to how to set up their financial systems was based on models used in western economies. This paper analyzes the experiences to set up a financial system in Central Europe. The experience in the first transition years (1990–1996) with financial system architecture shows that changes are slow but that the Central European countries tend to catch up more quickly with the western ones in the case of their banking systems than with respect to their stock markets.

This paper aims at analyzing the efforts to develop the financial system in Central Europe. Has advise from academics and multilateral institutions on financial system architecture been followed and what have been the results? How does the financial system of countries in Central and Eastern Europe compare to those of Western European ones? We focus on the structure of the financial system as the issue of financial sector reform is already dealt with to a great extent elsewhere in the literature (see Calvo and Kumar, 1993, Thorne, 1993, Caprio et al, 1994 and Griffith-Jones and Drábek, 1995). The structure of the paper is as follows: As the frame of reference in the transition economies in general has been the situation in Western Europe and North America, we first review the practices and principles of financial system architecture in these economies. The purpose is to come to a basic conceptual framework of institutional arrangements in financial systems. Then, in Section 3, we investigate the arguments to construct a particular system. Section 4 gathers evidence on the experience in Central Europe during the early transition years (1990–1996). We focus on bank credit and the stock market as these are regarded as both crucial determinants and indicators in discussions about financial system architecture. A conclusion is in Section 5.

The financial system in Central Europe is still under construction. This paper showed the immense differences between western financial systems and those in Central Europe. The review of the western financial systems revealed that there is much dispersion in the structure of the financial system in these countries as regards both size and composition. We also reviewed the arguments for and against putting up a financial structure skewed towards either bank or market domination. Both types have their advantages and disadvantages. However, economic theory does not come up with conclusions regarding a method to minimize agency costs in the imperfect real world. Neither does it provide a clear-cut rationale for government intervention in the financial system. Furthermore, empirical studies also have failed to point out the superiority of a particular type of financial system to all other systems. Nevertheless, academics and multilateral financial institutions used the arguments and played an important advising role in the construction of the financial system in Central Europe. However, as transparency lacks with respect to their recommendations, we only have indirect sources that reveal how they may have advised Central European countries on financial system architecture. In general, it appears that setting up a safe and sound universal banking system was given priority. But capital markets were to be developed relatively quickly too. It is somewhat reassuring that the advise more or less regards banks and markets as complements, whereas the bulk of the economic literature on financial intermediation sees them as substitutes. The empirical evidence on the financial sector in Central Europe is still much too meager to derive conclusions about the wisdom of the advise given. The financial sector is characterized by wide divergence as well as by much turbulence, as is revealed by the large number of banking crises. As always with social and economic change, there is path dependency and the developments are characterized by irreversibilities. The differences in the emerging skyline of the financial sector in Central Europe are – as in the more established ones in the west – mainly based on differences in culture, tradition, and geography. We found that the evidence in general tends to show that the direction of the transition develops along the lines of the ideas behind the original advise, both with respect to bank credit and stock markets: Banks are assumed to increase lending to the private sector; stock markets are assumed to offer both more finance and (foreign) investment opportunities. Although bank credit in general and bank credit to the private sector did not clearly increase in relation to GDP in Central Europe, bank claims on the private sector rose in nine of the eleven countries under consideration. The only exceptions were Hungary and Romania. The stock markets in Central Europe still are small and lack liquidity. In the first years of the transition, they perform no financing role whatsoever for the private sector. Furthermore, we found that with respect to our indicators of the development of a financial system, the Central European economies tend to catch up more quickly in the case of the banking sector than in the case of the stock market. However, with respect to almost all indicators and for most of the countries, we find that changes in the financial structure are very slow. It turns out that there is only a weak positive association between the size of the banking sector and per capita income, whereas such an association is absent for the size of the stock market and per capita income. Also, there is no positive association between the size of the stock market and FDI-inflows. We found that the banking sector in most countries is still weak and is vulnerable to shocks, largely due to the substantial amount of bad loans in their portfolios. This remains a threat for a well-functioning financial system. The small and underdeveloped stock markets appear not yet to improve economic performance. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that huge risks for the well-being of the financial system will originate from these stock markets. This may be regarded as a blessing in disguise.