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This paper aims to study the effect of country-level perceptions of corruption on commercial banks’ lending activity over the importance of loans and the quality of loan portfolios of banks in Europe.

The paper uses country-level perceptions of corruption scores from Transparency International, individual bank-specific data from ORBIS and macroeconomic data from the World Bank. The sample is composed of 640 commercial banks in 42 European countries from 2013 to 2019. The authors estimate, by pooled OLS, the relationship between corruption and the importance of loans and the quality of the banks’ loan portfolios. In addition, several robustness tests reinforce the results.

The results show that corruption negatively impacts the importance of loans in bank assets and positively impacts the proportion of bad loans. In addition, trade openness increases the weight of loans and the weight of nonperforming loans. Bank size, capital and risk also affect bank lending activity. Finally, European Monetary Union (EMU) membership reinforces the negative (positive) effect on loans (bad loans).

The results highlight the importance of fighting corruption. Governments, regulators and banks benefit from pursuing transparency-oriented policies to decrease the perception of corruption and foster economic development.

The literature on the impact of corruption on bank lending activity focuses mainly on high-corruption countries. This paper studies the European case, scarcely investigated in the literature, in the aftermath of two international financial crises and when significant regulatory transformations in banking supervision were instituted in the EMU countries.

What is the impact of financial literacy on the lending activity of banks? Based on the results of the S&P Global FinLit Survey for an extensive sample of countries, this paper aims to provide the first global test for the impact of country-level financial literacy on the lending activity of commercial banks.

The authors use data on financial literacy by country from the S&P Global FinLit Survey that was completed in 2014 and lending activity and macroeconomic control variables data from the World Bank from 2015 to 2017 to estimate the cross-sectional effect of financial literacy on the importance of loans and of non-performing loans, using different estimation methods.

The results show that, first, financial literacy favors lending activity, contributing to enhance the importance of credit in the economy. Second, financial literacy prevents bad loans from building up, thus reducing credit risk and favoring the quality of the credit portfolio of banks. These results are robust to several controls for macroeconomic conditions and the quality of institutions. They are also robust to different estimation methods.

The evidence of the positive (negative) impact of population financial literacy on the quantity (poor quality) of loans suggests that the efforts to enhance the financial literacy of the population contribute to the sustainable development of the financial sector and economic growth.

The paper extends to an international and country-level the available evidence of the consequences of the existence (or lack of) of financial literacy for the lending activity of commercial banks, focusing on the amount of credit granted and the quality of such credit. Thus, the paper provides an exploratory analysis of the impact of country-level financial literacy on the lending activities of commercial banks.

This paper aims to discuss the money creation mechanisms in emerging markets with special focus on external transactions and outlines the implications for monetary policy and financial stability issues.

To make the argument, the authors analyze a historical episode of flows of funds in Korea and Russia and conduct a canonical correlation analysis for a cross-section of emerging market economies.

The authors show that changes in the net foreign assets of the banking system are associated with (or cause) deposits fluctuations. In emerging markets, however, the scope of such fluctuations is limited unless driven by changes in the foreign reserves of a central bank.

Some preliminary implications for financial stability implementation may be drawn from this analysis. Introducing the net stable funding ratio requirement is unlikely to have any significant destabilizing effect on credit creation in emerging markets (in this regard, it is similar to the restriction on banks’ foreign currency position, which is a common prudential measure). Instead, it is likely to trigger a balance of payment adjustment that is similar to that experienced by an economy during its transition from fixed to flexible exchange rate regime.

Large global banks were at the heart of the global financial crisis. In response to the crisis, the Financial Stability Board published an integrated set of policy measures, such as capital surcharges, to address the systemic and moral hazard risks associated with global systemically important banks (G-SIBs). Almost 10 years later, it is time to take stock of the impact of these measures. This paper answers three questions on what happened to the G-SIBs. First, have they shrunk in size? Second, are they better capitalised? Third, have they reduced their global reach?

This paper looks at the individual G-SIBs and compares the situation before the crisis with the current situation. In this methodology, the differences because of changes at individual banks and changes in the ranking within the group (composition effect) are disentangled. Data have been collected on these banks from SNL Financial (banking database) and annual reports.

First, a substantial increase in capital levels is seen, though the distribution is uneven. China and USA are leading the pact with leverage ratios (Tier 1 capital divided by total assets) of around 7 per cent for their large banks, whereas Europe and Japan are trailing behind with ratios between 4 and 5 per cent. Second, a strong composition effect is identified: a shift of business from the global European banks to the more domestic Asian banks, which are gradually increasing their global reach. The US banks keep their strong position. So, the decline in cross-border banking is largely because of a composition effect (i.e. a reshuffle of the global banking champions league) and far less due to a reduced global reach of individual banks.

From the results on capital, recommendations are made on capital requirements (see below at social implications).

It is noted that the euro area, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland trail behind with a leverage ratio between 4 and 5 per cent. It is recommended these countries bring the leverage ratio of their largest banks more in line with international practice.

The effects of the reform after the global financial crisis on the large global banks have not been researched in detail. This paper split the results by country of incorporation (home country). This gives interesting differences, which the paper relates to specific policies (or lack of policies) in these countries.

This paper aims to examine whether credit ratings of banks are related to their location, i.e. inside or outside the Euro Area.

The authors estimate a multilevel ordered probit model for banks’ credit ratings in 2011 and control for bank-specific factors. They use the overall ratings and the external support ratings provided by Fitch as the dependent variable.

Banks located in Euro Area member countries, on average, receive a higher credit rating from Fitch than banks located outside the Euro Area. Evidence for a “too-big-to-fail” and a “too-big-to-rescue” effect was also found.

The monetary union effect on banks’ credit ratings may be affected by the period under investigation. The ratings refer to August 2011, when the European sovereign debt crisis was at its height. This implies that, if anything, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) effect is underestimated.

Large banks in the Euro Area receive higher credit ratings, so they have a competitive advantage over small banks located outside the Euro Area.

The present evidence suggests that small European countries with an extensive banking sector will be better off if they are member of the European EMU.

The relationship between location of banks and their credit ratings has hardly been researched before. The present evidence is directly related to a debate in the literature on this issue.

The purpose of this paper is to discover and enumerate the elements of the digital library and measure how much an individual library was equipped with the characteristics of the digital library accordingly.

For this purpose several steps were taken. First, research on the characteristics and the representative services of the digital library were comprehensively reviewed. Second, examples of the library services that were being considered for the next generation digital library were investigated to compare with the conventional library services. Third, the elements of the conventional and the digital libraries initially extracted were examined by ten experts. These experts were composed of researchers and professors specializing in digital libraries, and career librarians who had worked in the digital library field for at least ten years. The elements were verified through discussions with them. Fourth, 19 university libraries, 16 public libraries, and 17 special libraries were selected in accordance with the verified elements of the conventional and the digital libraries to measure the digitization level of the libraries.

The following is a summary of the evaluation of the first eight evaluation items, which are covered in Part 1 of this study. The remaining five items will be covered in Part 2. First, the digitization level of the acquisition element and classification and cataloguing was significantly high. Second, book collections excluding “digital video,” reference service, library program service, and space service showed significantly conventional characteristics. Third, in the element of circulation services, the item of lending books offline and returning the books scored 92.64 and the item of lending-returning with use of smart devices and social media obtained significantly low scores. Also, the average in using the book return desk for the circulation service was 81.39, much higher than using the automatic book return machine, which scored 18.61, by a wide margin. Fourth, in the element of user services, the digital item of providing support for mobile services related to the library resources demonstrated higher scores than the conventional item, but other items showed more conventional characteristics. In particular, the item of duplication services for material scored 94.99, but other items such as support for publication/bookbinding services using digital publication tools and devices obtained significantly low scores.

This study is first study in the world to measure the level of digitization of the library. Therefore, hereafter, each library will be able to measure and determine its digital position based on these elements. Up to now, some research was performed in pursuit of extracting the elements of a library but it has relied solely on literature review. Comprehensive research had never been performed as in this study.