Globalisation, Investment, and Global Economic Growth

Abstract

For any economy to be healthy, a strong financial system is required to efficiently move funds from unproductive to productive economic agents. Banks play an important role in this respect as their presence and structure reduces the problems of adverse selection, moral hazard, and asymmetric information. Recent decades have been overshadowed by a series of systemic banking crises that have left many parts of the developing world gasping for breath. In particular, economies like Mexico and the East Asian tigers have been hit hard both during and in the aftermath of such financial misadventures. This chapter thus attempts to examine the causes of banking crises in the light of available evidence. More specifically, the research enumerates and analyses the role of both macroeconomic and microeconomic factors in precipitating such crises through a critical examination of the existing literature, and illustrates each factor with examples from key pan-global financial catastrophes.