1、PDF外文：http:/ Comparative Financial Systems Franklin Allen Wharton School University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 allenfwharton.upenn.edu Douglas Gale Economics Department New York University New York, NY 10003 Douglas.Galenyu.edu April 2001 1 What is a Financial System?
2、 The purpose of a nancial system is to channel funds from agents with surpluses to agents with decits. In the traditional literature there have been two approaches to analyzing this process. The rst is to consider how agents interact through nancial markets. The second looks at the opera
3、tion of nancial intermediaries such as banks and insurance companies. Fifty years ago, the nancial system could be neatly bifurcated in this way. Rich house-holds and large rms used the equity and bond markets,while less wealthy house-holds and medium and small rms used banks, insurance companies an
4、d other nancial institutions. Table 1, for example, shows the ownership of corporate equities in 1950. Households owned over 90 percent. By 2000 it can be seen that the situation had changed dramatically.By then households held less than 40 percent, nonbank intermediaries, primarily pension funds an
5、d mutual funds, held over 40 percent. This change illustrates why it is no longer possible to consider the role of nancial markets and nancial institutions separately. Rather than intermediating directly between households and rms, nancial institutions have increasingly come to intermediate between
6、households and markets, on the one hand, and between rms and markets,on the other. This makes it necessary to consider the nancial system as anirreducible whole. The notion that a nancial system transfers resources between households and rms is, of course, a simplication. Governments usually play a
7、significant role in the nancial system. They are major borrowers, particularlyduring times of war, recession, or when large infrastructure projects are being undertaken. They sometimes also save signicant amounts of funds. For example, when countries such as Norway and many Middle Eastern States hav
8、e access to large amounts of natural resources (oil), the government may acquire large trust funds on behalf of the population. In addition to their roles as borrowers or savers, governments usually playa number of other important roles. Central banks typically issue at money and are extensively inv
9、olved in the payments system. Financial systems with unregulated markets and intermediaries, such as the US in the late nineteenth century, often experience nancial crises.The desire to eliminate these crises led many governments to intervene in a signicant way in the nancial system. Central b
10、anks or some other regulatory authority are charged with regulating the banking system and other intermediaries, such as insurance companies. So in most countries governments play an important role in the operation of nancialsystems. This intervention means that the political system, which determine
11、s the government and its policies, is also relevant for the nancial system. There are some historical instances where nancial markets and institutions have operated in the absence of a well-dened legal system, relyinginstead on reputation and other implicit mechanisms. However, in most nancial syste
12、ms the law plays an important role. It determines what kinds ofcontracts are feasible, what kinds of governance mechanisms can be used for corporations, the restrictions that can be placed on securities and so forth. Hence, the legal system is an important component of a nancial system. A nancial sy
13、stem is much more than all of this, however. An important pre-requisite of the ability to write contracts and enforce rights of various kinds is a system of accounting. In addition to allowing contracts to be written, an accounting system allows investors to value a company more easily and to assess
14、 how much it would be prudent to lend to it. Accounting information is only one type of information (albeit the most important) required by nancial systems. The incentives to generate and disseminate information are crucial features of a nancial system.Without signicant amounts of human capital it w
15、ill not be possible for any of these components of a nancial system to operate eectively. Well-trained lawyers, accountants and nancial professionals such as bankers are crucial for an eective nancial system, as the experience of Eastern Europe demonstrates. The literature on comparative nancial sys
16、tems is at an early stage. Our survey builds on previous overviews by Allen (1993), Allen and Gale (1995) and Thakor (1996). These overviews have focused on two sets of issues. (1)Normative: How eective are dierent types of nancial system atvarious functions? (2) Positive: What drives the evolution
17、of the nancial system? The rst set of issues is considered in Sections 2-6, which focus on issues of investment and saving, growth, risk sharing, information provision and corporate governance, respectively. Section 7 considers the inuence of law and politics on the nancial system while Section 8 lo
18、oks at the role nancial crises have had in shaping the nancial system. Section 9 contains concluding remarks. 2 Investment and Saving One of the primary purposes of the nancial system is to allow savings to be invested in rms. In a series of important papers, Mayer (1988, 1990) documents how r
19、ms obtained funds and nanced investment in a number of dierent countries. Table 2 shows the results from the most recent set of studies, based on data from 1970-1989, using Mayers methodology. The gures use data obtained from sources-and-uses-of-funds statements. For France, the data are from Bertero (1994), while for the US, UK, Japan and Germany they are from Corbett and Jenkinson (1996). It can be seen that internal nance is by far the most important source of funds in all countries.Bank nance is moderately important
