Financial crises and financial market regulation: the long record of an ‘emerger’

The main goal of this paper is to trace the long record of financial crises and financial market regulation from the perspective of an emerging economy. Two questions are addressed: first, what explains the incidence and severity of financial crises in an emerging market economy? And, second, what is the role of learning: how does the country learn from its past experience in financial crises to improve institutions and develop better techniques so as to successfully manage successive crisis events? To answer the above questions, I first present evidence on financial crises in Greece over a long time span. Greece has been chosen as an appropriate case-study since it is a country with a rich history in financial crises. I try to identify a variety of crisis events, thus providing a chronology. Moreover, I present a number of facts about the incidence, frequency and severity of crises events. Second, I discuss the key determinants of the crises, which are closely related to country-specific factors, such as credit expansion, fiscal imbalances, and the limited reserve coverage of the monetary base. And third, I deal with the evolution of the regulation. I place emphasis on the post-crisis regulatory responses that changed the country’s institutional developments.