Sectoral Development Reviews
Sectoral developmental reviews complement the assessments of regulatory standards. Over the past several decades, extensive institutional change and experimentation in advanced economies have led to the emergence of elaborate regimes of regulation and supervision of the banking, insurance, and securities markets. Those regimes are designed to ensure integrity of the functioning within the sectors and to avoid behavior that is likely to contribute to failure. They have evolved largely in response to the rapid development of the financial sector in advanced economies rather than as a means of promoting the development of the sector—though, in several cases, regulatory liberalization has been influenced by a perceived risk to the competitiveness of domestic financial markets in an increasingly global financial system.
The standards and codes used for those sectors essentially codify what has emerged as the common core of what remains a somewhat diverse set of regulatory institutions. While the standards and codes represent a fairly firm and widely agreed framework for assessment on the prudential side, the mechanics of overcoming barriers to development of what are still unsophisticated financial systems in low - and middle-income countries are not something for which a comprehensive template can be distilled from current practice. Indeed, the standards and codes either explicitly or implicitly assume the presence of much of what is sought in the goal of developing the financial system and at the same time contain (to some extent) principles that guide institutional development and good practices in financial institutions. Promoting institutional development, however, raises issues of sequencing and absorptive capacity in implementing policy reforms. Because of those considerations, conducting the development assessment for any given subsector is necessarily less categorical, more subjective, and arguably more difficult than assessing the relevant standards and codes.
For most low - and middle-income countries, a brief and selective review of development issues provides the information that is needed on the preconditions for a full standards and codes assessment. Where standards and codes for a sector are not being fully assessed, the review of development issues can be accompanied by a less detailed, stability-oriented, regulatory assessment. The assessor should highlight deficiencies in quantity (scale and reach), quality, and price of the services provided and should attempt to identify the infrastructural weaknesses that have contributed to those deficiencies, as well as any policy flaws—including flaws in competition and tax policy—that have likely contributed to the deficiencies. Although some of the needed data are covered in crosscountry databases (as mentioned in chapter 2), for many other dimensions in each of the sectors, only noncomparable national sources are currently available. Those dimensions would include aspects such as the stock market free-float, reliance by large firms on international depositary receipts, transactions costs for securities markets, prices of insurance and efficiency of insurance products, and maturity structure of intermediary portfolios. The assessors must use their judgment in evaluating whatever information is available on such matters.
Because competitiveness issues have a pervasive influence on sectoral performance, the issues need to be analyzed in all sectors. The competitive structure of the industry
is a multi-dimensional concept in itself. That structure is not merely measured by concentration ratios and by Herfindahl indices, but—in acknowledgment of the distinction between concentration and contestability—also requires an understanding of regulatory influences, including restrictive regulations on branching or cross-regional service provision, on permissible lines of business, on product pricing (e. g., interest ceilings and premium rate floors), or on portfolio allocation (especially for insurance companies, including localization rules, but also including reserve requirements and so forth). Is the market de facto segmented, thereby limiting the pro-efficiency forces of competition? Is ownership of the main intermediaries linked to government or to industrial groups, thereby tending to entrench incumbents rather than enabling new entrepreneurs?
In addition to our looking at the aggregate national position, it is important, though often difficult, to assess the reach of each financial sector along the dimensions of geographic region, economic sector, size of firm, and number of households. Of course, the large and well-established firms in the main cities will have greatest access. The question is whether the gap between those and smaller firms and households in smaller centers and in rural areas is more than it should be. Sources of information on direct access to financial services—with a focus on those at different levels of income—are diverse and scarce. There is a growing appreciation of the importance of compiling data on who has access to what financial services, and efforts are under way to increase systematic coverage of financial issues in surveys of households, business users, financial service providers and their regulators, and national experts. All four types of information are needed for a comprehensive review.9
Going beyond aggregate measures of efficiency, availability, and cost of more-advanced products needs to be benchmarked for each of the main sectors. What products do users identify as lacking? How much maturity transformation does each sector achieve? How much is achieved overall through the interaction of the sectors? One may also mention consumer protection legislation, which, though present, is not uniformly at the fore in stability assessments.
Often, the review will reveal that the source of shortcomings is mostly in the policy environment (including the nonprudential or unneeded prudential regulations and taxation and the effects of state ownership) or in deficiencies in the legal, information, or transactional technology infrastructures. Such policy and infrastructural issues will often have a cross-cutting effect on several subsectors and need to be reported as such (see section 4.6).
