Political Economy of Bank Regulation in Developing Countries: Risk and Reputation

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

International banking standards are intended for the regulation of large, complex, risk-taking international banks with trillions of dollars in assets and operations across the globe. Yet they are being implemented in countries with nascent financial markets and small banks that have yet to venture into international markets. Why is this? This book develops a new framework to explain regulatory interdependence between countries in the core and the periphery of the global financial system. Drawing on in-depth analysis of eleven countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it shows how financial globalisation generates strong reputational and competitive incentives for developing countries to converge on international standards. It explains how specific cross-border relations between regulators, politicians, and banks within developing countries, and international actors including investors, peer regulators, and international financial institutions, generate regulatory interdependence. It explains why some configurations of domestic politics and forms of integration into global finance generate convergence with international standards, while other configurations lead to divergence. This book contributes to our understanding of the ways in which governments and firms in the core of global finance powerfully shape regulatory decisions in the periphery, and the ways that governments and firms from peripheral developing countries manoeuvre within the constraints and opportunities created by financial globalisation.