tailieunhanh - The Internationalization of Financial Services in Asia

The internationalization of financial services¾ eliminating discrimination in the treatment between foreign and domestic financial services providers and removing barriers to the cross-border provision of financial services¾ is of global interest, but of special interest to Asia. Most of Asia limits entry of foreign financial firms much more than otherwise comparable countries. Empirical evidence for Asia¾ and other countries¾ suggests that this leads to slower institutional development and more costly financial services provision. Going forward, Asian countries could benefit from accelerating the opening up, in conjunction with further capital account liberalization and domestic deregulation of their financial markets. Ongoing financial service negotiations. | Tuesday May 26 1998 INTERNATIONALIZATION OF FINANCIAL SERVICES IN ASIA by Stijn Claessens World Bank and Tom Glaessner Soros Fund Management Abstract The internationalization of financial services eliminating discrimination in the treatment between foreign and domestic financial services providers and removing barriers to the cross-border provision of financial services is of global interest but of special interest to Asia. Most of Asia limits entry of foreign financial firms much more than otherwise comparable countries. Empirical evidence for Asia and other countries suggests that this leads to slower institutional development and more costly financial services provision. Going forward Asian countries could benefit from accelerating the opening up in conjunction with further capital account liberalization and domestic deregulation of their financial markets. Ongoing financial service negotiations at the WTO give countries the opportunity to commit to this opening up with built-in safeguards and the possibility of phasing in which could be very valuable. Paper presented at the conference Investment Liberalisation and Financial Reform in the Asia-Pacific Region August 29-31 Sydney Australia and at the conference India A Financial System for the 21st Century December 6-8 Goa India. The paper was written while Glaessner was on the staff of the World Bank. We would like to thank a large number of people too numerous to mention individually in various agencies and private market institutions throughout Asia for their cooperation and information sharing Jim Hanson Leonardo Hernandez Bernard Hoekman Daniela Klingebiel Chad Leechor Philip Molyneux Guy Pfeffermann Edwin Truman Zhen Kun Wang and Alan Winters for useful comments Marínela Dado for her detailed analysis of the barriers and costs measures in Sections 7 and 8 and Catherine Downard for research assistance. The paper also draws on Claessens and Hindley 1997 . The paper was written during the summer of 1997 before