The Banking Sector and Corporate Finance

A corporate financing mechanism plays a pivotal role in a market economy for growth. This chapter tries to clarify, both from a macro and a microeconomic viewpoint, what sort of mechanism is emerging in Russia. The country has been experiencing positive economic growth since 1999. Now that the effect of the drastic depreciation of the exchange rate in 1998 has faded, Russia is facing a test as to whether a sustainable economic growth is possible even in the event of adverse price movement of major export items, such as oil and gas, on international markets, or in other words, as to whether a sufficiently self-sustaining system has been developed to enable continued economic growth under market-economic principles. In the context of corporate finance, the enterprises, which used to rely completely on the state budget and the national bank (Gosbank) for their financing needs under the erstwhile command economy, can no longer hope to do so after the regime change. At the same time, they are now capable of making independent decisions regarding their financial needs. Their behavior is influenced not only by their needs but also by the efficiency of the financial sector as well as by various institutional frameworks surrounding it. Reforms to the latter were initiated from scratch after the regime change and have been evolving ever since. Hence, a study of enterprise behavior in the area of corporate finance would also clarify the extent to which the economic system has been transformed (Sugiura 2007).