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Financial Structure www.ephilipdavis.com
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Financial Structure: An Investigation of sectoral balance
sheets in the G-7 This is a first rate contribution to the literature on comparative financial systems. It presents new data and analyses of the financial structures in the G-7 countries. It should be read by everybody interested in understanding the operation of financial systems. Professor Franklin Allen, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Philip Davis and Joe Byrne inject life into the statistical bare bones of sectoral balance sheets. These stock data give a current picture of the accumulated flows (deficits/surpluses) of bygone years, and of their financing patterns. In turn, knowledge of this changing history, and of the current stock position, gives the authors an excellent platform for discerning likely future financial trends, including a discussion whether bank-based (Continental Europe and Japan) and market-based systems (Anglo-Saxon countries) are likely to converge. Questions about the nature, and relevance, of differences in financial structures are perennial. Those concerned with such issues will find this book a `must buy'. Professor Charles Goodhart, LSE and Bank of England
Summary Cross country comparisons of sectoral balance sheets offer crucial indications of differences in overall financial structure, which in turn underlie contrasts in financing and economic behaviour. In this context, this book aims to confront theory and extant empirical work with aggregate financial data across the G-7, covering the period from 1970 to 2000. Viewed in the light of the main theoretical and empirical results in the economic literature, it explores the contrasting patterns and development of financial structures in the UK, the US, Germany, Japan, Canada, France and Italy. It uses as raw material sectoral balance sheet data published by national statistical authorities across the corporate, household, general government, foreign, financial, banking and institutional-investor sectors. |