The paper analyzes the provision of electronic financial services in countries, the impact of e-finance on the financial systems, and the leapfrogging opportunities for emerging markets. The authors address new policy issues and the role of government intervention in the light of these...

In recent years, the emergence of electronic finance - especially online banking and brokerage services, and new trading systems - has reshaped the financial landscape around the world. This paper reviews these developments and finds that they are greatly impacting the structure of and...

Because financial services are highly dependent on technology and well-suited to remote delivery, technological advances and the advent of the Internet are causing dramatic changes in the industry. This revolution could accelerate financial sector development by lowering the costs, increasing...

Asian countries should consider the benefits of opening their financial service sectors more quickly - at the same time that they are liberalizing capital accounts and deregulating domestic financial markets. The internationalization of financial services - eliminating discrimination between the...

This paper builds on a previous series of papers (see Claessens, Glaessner, and Klingebiel, 2001, 2002) that identified electronic security as a key component to the delivery of electronic finance benefits. This paper and its technical annexes identify and discuss seven key pillars necessary to...

The case study on the U.S. TreasuryDirect examines the evolution of the electronic distribution systems for marketable and nonmarketable government securities, the main objectives, and the basic legal infrastructure and the preconditions enabling the system. The U.S. experience highlights that...

Claessens, Klingebiel, and Laeven analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions'...

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of different degrees of competition and different configurations of permissible activities in the financial sector and discusses the related implications for regulation and supervision. Theory and experience demonstrate the importance of competition...

This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-96. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...