Banking Reform in Transition Economies

Countries making the transition to a market economy have pursued a variety of approaches to banking reform. To become globally competitive, however, transition economies will need to accelerate bank privatization and the reform of bank manage­ment and governance.

1.        The former centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Baltic countries, Russia, and the other countries of the former Soviet Union (BRO) face a formidable challenge: their banks, tradition­ally passive conduits for funds, must be transformed into efficient financial intermediaries and active agents of market discipline. Despite progress, weaknesses persist in many transition economies' banks. The absence of sound banking systems has hindered the development of nonbank financial markets, private sector investment and the conduct of monetary policy.

2.        To correct structural weakness in their banking systems, transition economies have financially restructured banks, improved, enabling environments, and reorganized banking sectors through consolidation and privati­zation. Significant systemic risk remains, however, because of excessive exposure to weak enterprises and unsound management and governance. Most transition countries have made progress toward market-based banking systems, but none has succeeded in fully meeting the needs of the emerging of pri­vate sector. There is evidence that, unless banking reforms accelerate, companies will find it difficult to obtain adequate and affordable services of high quality.

3.        To restore bank liquidity and solvency and meet the private sector's financing needs transition countries need to develop banking sec­tors that operate on commercial principles in a competitive environment and that have strong management and internal supervision. To increase competition and improve service, governments need to open markets to foreign banks and allow the most competitive domestic banks to extend their locations and operations. The success of banking reforms will also require the curtailment of funds for loss making of bank and enterprise, the acceleration of bank and enterprise privatization, an improved legal and regulatory framework, and efficient payment systems. 

           Different approaches

4.        Central and Eastern European countries recapitalized state banks out of the belief that removing old loans from bank balance sheets would restore solvency and allow state banks to compete with private banks. Some progress has been made, but most state banks are still not efficient The BRO countries have taken a different approach. These countries privatized branches of the monobank system without recapitalizing. Hyperinfaltion erased the nominal value of old, nonperforming loans — a de facto financial restructuring of the banks’ balance sheets. However, as in Central and Eastern Europe, management and governance practices have not fully adapted to competitive markets. Although privately owned, many BRO banks operate according to uncompetitive or monopolistic principles. The perfor­mance of banks in the Baltic countries has been mixed: Estonia has made progress by applying hard budget constraints on loss-making enterprises, while Latvia’s bank system is in disarray because of excessive risk-taking and unsound trade-financial practices.

5.        Recapitalization.  Recapitalization of state banks in Central and Eastern Europe bought time for restructuring, without a radical overhaul of policies, procedures, practices, and incentives. However, bank performance has remained poor, and state banks have made demands of additional capital at high fiscal cost. The cost of recapitalization in Hungary, for example, has been $3,2 billion — equivalent to 7,5 percent of Hungary’s GDP in 1994.

6.        Carve-outs have been the most common form of recapitalization: governments have issued bonds to replace nonperforming loans made before a cutoff, restoring bank solvency. Bank have been held responsible for loan collection and loss-provisioning on nonperforming loans made after the cutoff date. While loss-provisioning practices have improved, nonperforming loans continue to be a problem, partly because of inadequate credit policies and poor risk management.

7.        Restructuring bad loans. Countries have pursued a variety of bank-led approaches to deal with nonperforming loans. In the past bad loans were rolled over. State guarantees were meant to support banks if enterprises failed to repay their rolled-over debt. But guarantee coverage was never clearly specified, and many of state banks in Central and Eastern Europe face a major write-down of asset values unless agreement is reached with outside creditors and former trading partners.

8.        Four countries have established bank restructuring agencies, which can clean up loan portfolios and restructure bank management and operations in advance of privatization. However, shallow markets and a scarcity of experienced staff are the main impediments to broader use of such agencies.

           The right environment

9.        To improve resource allocation, countries have introduced policies encouraging positive real interest rates and limiting the use of directed credits and other subsidies to pre­ferred sectors. The supervision of commercial banks by central banks has been strength­ened, and indirect methods of monetary control (reserve and liquidity requirements, treasury bill markets) have been introduced.

10.      Laws and regulations. Despite sub­stantial progress, the legal and regulatory framework remains weak in most transi­tion economies. Weaknesses include excessive risk-taking in investments (cross-ownership, swaps) and trade financing; savings deposit monopolies (distorted funding market, excess interbank exposure); and poor enforcement of prudential regulations. The difficulties of loan recovery are compounded, by ambiguous property and collateral rights, slow bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings, and underdeveloped out-of-court resolution methods. In the absence of a strong market-based legal tradition, inde­pendent courts, experienced judges and lawyers, and systems of commercial valuation, bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings are laborious. Where they do occur with regular­ity — Hungary and Poland — the heavy back­log of cases slows contract enforcement and loan recovery.

11.      Legal reforms have addressed some shortcomings. Two-tiered banking systems have been established. The independence of central banks has been clearly specified. Out-of-court mechanisms have been introduced to accelerate dispute resolution and circumvent the weaknesses of the court systems. However, stronger laws and institutions are still needed in transition countries.   

12.      On the regulatory front, countries have tightened licensing standards to clarify capital requirements, scope of operations, management and shareholder responsibilities, and reporting requirements. Stricter standards have been developed for loan classifica­tion, risk weighting, loan-loss provisioning, capital adequacy, and treatment of in­terest accruals and principal rollovers to conform to international standards. Some countries now limit bank exposure to large borrowers, shareholders, and managers to a certain percentage of bank capital. Foreign-exchange operations are more tightly monitored, and liquidity requirements are better enforced. Credit policies and pro­cedures have been tightened. Implementation is sometimes undermined, however, by inadequate training of senior bank manage­ment, local pressures on loan officers, and weak supervision.

13.      Corporate governance. Corporate gov­ernance of banks and enterprises still suffers from the absence of market mechanisms, weak standards of information disclosure and accountability, lack of trained management and board supervisors, and a stunted tradition of private ownership. Some progress has been made: supervisory boards have been restruc­tured and encouraged to monitor management performance according to commercial criteria; management has been replaced or reorga­nized; and performance incentives have been introduced. More changes are needed, how­ever, to strengthen daily bank operations, guidelines, procedures, and planning.

14.      Institutional capacity. Bank supervi­sion remains weak. Supervisors have little of the experience with risk management that is needed for inspection and surveillance. Poor information systems weaken off-site surveil­lance and early warning capacity. Bank super­vision is focused on liquidity and other immediate concerns, while longer-term risk-management issues are often overlooked. Supervisors are unable to use their enforce­ment powers because many of the largest banks are still state owned and, in BRO coun­tries, because of a weak legal framework.

15.      Accounting practices in centrally planned economies were not designed to monitor bank solvency and liquidity. Liquidity prob­lems were obscured by the improper classifi­cation of loans; risk weighting was inaccurate or nonexistent; and there was little, if any, provisioning for loan losses. Under these conditions, accounting and auditing profes­sionals never developed the skills needed for managing commercial banks in a market economy. Most transition economies have revised their accounting laws to bring them into line with international standards. The new standards are beginning to expose sol­vency and liquidity risks. The challenge now is for management and boards to use such information to strengthen the competitive position and financial condition of their banks.

16.      The BRO countries have had a particularly acute problem with inefficient payment sys­tems, leading to long delays in bank transfers, verifications, and settlements. Reforms have emphasized more efficient payment methods and clearinghouse systems, the introduction of checks, settlement systems to accelerate processing between banks and countries, and courier systems to upgrade service. Russian banks have developed their own payment sys­tem, which has improved vastly since 1994.

 

 

           Ownership, scale, and scope

17.      Most transition economies need to address issues of appropriate ownership, scale, and scope in banking. In Central and Eastern Europe, the dominance of state banks distorts the banking system and constrains market development. To remove this distor­tion, privatization must accelerate. How­ever, privatization alone is not enough. It must be accompanied by thorough restructuring.

18.      Another legacy of central planning is excessive bank specialization, which limits opportunities for portfolio diversification and unnecessarily fragments banking sys­tems. Raising minimum capital require­ments, strengthening bank supervision, and allowing weak banks to fail could provide needed stability to the banking sector with­out unduly obstructing entry or market-based specialization.

           Early lessons

        Some general lessons can be extracted from the different outcomes of reform programs so far:

· Bank recapitalization can restore bank solvency and shore up public confidence if reinforced by fiscal prudence, hard budget constraints on loss-making banks and enterprises, and reform of incentive structures. However, because these conditions have not been fully met, recapitalization has instead often delayed the necessary restructuring of banks (and debtor enterprises).

· Bank restructuring agencies can help con­solidate banking systems and restructure loan portfolios. However, they can be expensive and can drain scarce personnel from banks. As an alternative, governments could write off problem loans up front, allow banks to expense loan losses as a pre-tax item, and encourage banks to develop workout units.

· Debt-equity swaps, loan sales, and asset swaps can strengthen bank balance sheets and generate large profits once markets are stronger. However, banks would be better off making their core businesses as profit­able as possible, rather than assuming equity risk in weak companies in an uncertain eco­nomic climate.

· Reforms in the legal and regulatory envi­ronment should include establishing an orderly bank liquidation process that allow banks to fail without undermining depositor confidence; raising capital-adequacy ratios above the standard target of 8 percent; ratio­nalizing deposit-insurance systems to limit government liability and remove distortions impeding competition for savings; containing the use of highly leveraged formulas to attract deposits when portfolio risk exceeds prudent guidelines; and improving bankruptcy and liquidation mechanisms for enterprises to make resource management more efficient.

· Bank supervision is still weak. Bank supervisors must have the authority to enforce prudential regulations and the institu­tional capacity to monitor risk.

· Bank governance has improved. How­ever, management and governance weak­nesses are still pervasive, and concentrated enterprise ownership of private banks re­mains problematic.

· Privatization and restructuring of large state banks are necessary to improve the per­formance and competitiveness of the banking sector. When governments try to maintain control of bank and enterprise operations, economies are likely to pay the price over time in lost competitiveness and slower growth.

 

© Finance & Development

Task 1.       Analysing text structure

1 è   How and where is the message of the article formulated?

2 è   Does it develop a single point? If not, list the points.

3 è   Is each point supported with logically presented facts? What are they?

4 è   Does the author use definitions and provide examples to explain his position?

5 è   Is there any information that may be omitted?

 

Task 2.       Discussing the content

è Make up a list of issues necessary to effect banking reform in transition economies.

Task 3.       Writing

è Write a speech on one of the issues from your list (maximum 500 words).

 

by Richard Allen Stull

                                                                                                                                                 Give credit where due, but recognize                    

that borrowing is an art in itself.

 

Perhaps the earliest published collection of quotations was The Proverbs by John Heywood. Heywood lived in the 1500s, and his collection of English colloquial sayings included such well known sayings as, “All is well that ends well;” “Two heads are better than one;” and many popular quotations, the original authors of which are unknown. Many of these, however, would be considered trite today.

Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time was first published in 1977. This is a compilation of some of the best expressed thoughts, ancient and modern — gems of brevity, wit and originality relevant to the problems of today. This volume was assembled by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, the man who formulated the Peter Principle (“People in any hierarchy will advance to their highest level of incompetence”).

For current quotable games, try the magazine Vital Speeches, which prints recent speeches of leaders of thought on timely subjects.

Give credit where due, but recognise that borrowing is an art in itself. The main thing to remember is that, as a speaker, you should occasionally say something that somebody else can borrow. Some speakers frequently use the work of others. However, there is a difference between a cribber and creative absorber. The latter adds, builds, improves and perhaps develops the ideas that are seldom new:

 

 

I shot a joke into the air,

it was reprinted everywhere.               

In Fortune magazine I read it.       

Let them steal it if they please;

I stole it from old Sophocles,           

and Sophocles, without a doubt,

revised the thing and sent it out.      

Quotations should be used judiciously. They are especially useful to begin, end or support an argument or key point of a presentation. You may find the following guidelines helpful for selecting quotations:

· The person quoted should be an authority, recognised and accepted by your audience as qualified and reliable.

· If authority is doubtful, it is advisable to describe the background and experience of the person being quoted.

· The quotation should be timely and not contradicted at a later date by the person quoted.

· The quotation should be accurate and not taken out of context.

· The quotation should be brief and preferably read rather than memorised or paraphrased.

· Don't hesitate to use personal experiences. If your employer, mechanic or mailman makes a point worth repeating, by all means, use it.

Season your speech with quotations, but use them selectively and sparingly

 

 

©The Toastmaster

 

è Comment on the following point: “Give credit where due, but recognize that borrowing is an art in itself.”

è Summarise the guidelines recommended for selecting quotations.

Guidelines to Footnoting

What to footnote

Except for common factual knowledge, all information taken from a source, whether it is quoted directly or put in your own words, must be followed by a footnote – all quotations, all ideas and opinions, all precise factual information such as statistics. (In some cases you yourself may know statistical information, but in such a case it is usually wise to check on your own memory by finding a source of the information).

Incorporating source material into your paper

When incorporating source material into a paper, be sure that you make clear to the reader what is from a source and what is not. As a general rule, quotations, opinions, and ideas that appear in your paper are preceded by a signal phrase, such as “According to Stanley Fisher” or “As Yegor Gaidar has observed.” The quotation, opinion, or idea is then followed by a footnote number, indicating  to the reader that everything between the signal and the footnote number is from the source, whether directly quoted or put in your own words.

Here are two examples of the proper form for introducing direct quotations:

 

In February 1999, Michael Camdessus, the IMF’s Managing Director, said in his opening remarks: “We are clearly far from the end of the road.” 1

 

Factual material is also usually preceded by a signal phrase and followed by a footnote number, but it is often put in one’s own words, as in the following example:

   

According to M.Goldstein, nonperforming loans amounted to at least 15-20 percent of total loans.2

Except for numbers, the writer is not borrowing wording from his source and doesn’t need to use quotation marks. The footnote exists to let the reader know just where the writer obtained the information.

Footnote form

³ Yegor Gaidar, “…”, Finance and Development, June 1999, p. 6.

 

¹ M. Camdessus. “…”, Finance and Development, 1991, p.31

² M. Goldstein, “… ”, Finance and Development, 1999, p. 1

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