Financial liberalization was expected to make interest rates, and asset prices more volatile, with distributional consequences, such as reduced, or relocated rents, and increased competition in financial services. The author examines available data on money market, and bank interest rates for evidence of whether these things happened. He shows that as more and more countries liberalized, the level and dynamic behavior of developing-country interest rates converged to industrial-country norms. In the short term, volatility increased in both real, and nominal money market interest rates. Treasury bill rates, and bank spreads, evidently the most repressed, showed the greatest increase as liberalization progressed - shifting substantial rents from the public sector, and from favored borrowers. Whereas quoted bank spreads in industrial countries contracted somewhat in the late 1990s, spreads in developing countries remained much higher, presumably reflecting both market power, and the higher risks of lending in the developing world. There was no clear-cut change in mean rates of inflation, monetary depth, or GDP growth. If anything, there was a small average improvement in inflation, but a decline in monetary depth, and economic growth, relative to trends in industrial countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)