金融体系中英文对照外文翻译文献
(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)
Comparative Financial Systems
1 What is a Financial System?
The purpo of a financial system is to channel funds from agents with surplus to agents with deficits. In the traditional literature there have been two approaches to analyzing this process. The first is to吗丁啉的作用 consider how agents interact through financial markets. The cond looks at the operation of financial intermediaries such as banks and insurance companies. Fifty years ago, the financial system could be neatly bifurcated in this way. Rich hou-holds and large firms ud the 鸡今年多大equity and bond markets,while less wealthy hou-holds and medium and small firms ud banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. Table 1, for example, shows the ownership of corporate equities in 1950. Houholds owned over 90 percent. By 2000 it can be en that the situation had changed
dramatically.By then houholds held less than 40 percent, nonbank intermediaries, primarily pension funds and mutual funds, held over 40 percent. This change illustrates why it is no longer possible to consider the role of financial markets and financial institutions parately. Rather than intermediating directly between houholds and firms, financial institutions have increasingly come to intermediate between houholds and markets, on the one hand, and between firms and markets,on the other. This makes it necessary to consider the financial system as anirreducible whole.
The notion that a financial system transfers resources between houholds and firms is, of cour, a simplification. Governments usually play a significant role in the financial system. They are major borrowers, particularlyduring times of war, recession, or when large infrastructure projects are being undertaken. They sometimes also save significant amounts of funds. For example, when countries such as Norway and many Middle Eastern States have access to large amounts of natural resources (oil), the government may acquire large trust funds on behalf of the population.
In addition to their roles as borrowers or savers, governments usually playa number of other important roles. Central banks typically issue fiat money and are extensively involved in the payments system. Financial systems with unregulated markets and intermediaries, such as the US in the late nineteenth century, often experience financial cris.The desire to eliminate the cris led many governments to intervene in a significant way in the financial system. Central banks or some other regulatory authority are charged with regulating the banking system and other intermediaries, such as insurance companies. So in most countries governments play an important role in the operation of financialsystems. This intervention means that the political system, which determines the government and its policies, is also relevant for the financial system.
There are some historical instances where financial markets and institutions have operated in the abnce of a well-defined legal system, relyinginstead on reputation and other implicit mechanisms. However, in most financial systems the law plays an important role. It determines what kinds ofcontracts are feasible, what kinds of governance mechanisms can be ud for corporations, the restrictions that can be placed on curitie
s and so forth. Hence, the legal system is an important component of a financial system.
A financial system is much more than all of this, however. An important pre-requisite of the ability to write contracts and enforce rights of various kinds is a system of accounting. In addition to allowing contracts to be written, an accounting system allows investors to value a company more easily and to asss how much it would be prudent to lend to it. Accounting information is only one type of information (albeit the most important) required by financial systems. The incentives to generate and disminate information are crucial features of a financial system.Without significant amounts of human capital it will not be possible for any of the components of a financial system to operate effectively. Well-trained lawyers, accountants and financial professionals such as bankers are crucial for an effective financial system, as the experience of Eastern Europe demonstrates.
The literature on comparative financial systems is at an early stage. Our survey builds on previous overviews by Allen (1993), Allen and Gale (1995) and Thakor (1996). The overviews have focud on two ts of issues.
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诗词满江红(1)Normative: How effective are different types of financial system atvarious functions?
(2) Positive: What drives the evolution of the financial system?
油淋干豆腐
The first t of issues is considered in Sections 2-6, which focus on issues of investment and saving, growth, risk sharing, information provision and corporate governance, respectively. Section 7 considers the influence of law and politics on the financial system while Section 8 looks at the role financial cris have had in shaping the financial system. Section 9 contains concluding
remarks.
2 Investment and Saving
One of the primary purpos of the financial system is to allow savings to be invested in firms. In a ries of important papers, Mayer (1988, 1990) documents how firms obtained funds and financed investment in a number of different countries. Table 2 shows the results from the most recent t of studies, bad on data from 1970-1989, using Mayer’s
methodology. The figures u data obtained from sources-and-us-of-funds statements. For France, the data are from Bertero (1994), while for the US, UK, Japan and Germany they are from Corbett and Jenkinson (1996). It can be en that internal finance is by far the most important source of funds in all countries.Bank finance is moderately important in most countries and particularly important in Japan and France. Bond finance is only important in the US and equity finance is either unimportant or negative (i.e., shares are being repurchad in aggregate) in all countries. Mayer’s studies and tho using his methodology have had an important impact becau they have raid the question of how important financial markets are in terms of providing funds for investment. It ems that, at least in the aggregate, equity markets 鸡汤文字are unimportant while bond markets are important only in the US. The findings contrast strongly with the emphasis on equity and bond markets in 潮人发型the traditional finance literature. Bank finance is important in all countries,but not as important as internal finance.
Another perspective on how the financial system operates is obtained by looking at savings and the holding of financial asts. Table 3 shows the relative importance of bank
s and markets in the US, UK, Japan, France and Germany. It can be en that the US is at one extreme and Germany at the other. In the US, banks are relatively unimportant: the ratio of asts to GDP is only 53%, about a third the German ratio of 152%. On the other hand, the US ratio of equity market capitalization to GDP is 82%, three times the German ratio of 24%. Japan and the UK are interesting intermediate cas where banks and markets are both important. In France, banks are important and markets less so. The US and UK are often referred to as market-bad systems while Germany, Japan and France are often referred to as bank-bad systems. Table 4 shows the total portfolio allocation of asts ultimately owned by the houhold ctor. In the US and UK, equity is a much more important component of houhold asts than in Japan,Germany and France. For cash and cash equivalents (which includes bank accounts), the rever is true. Tables 3 and 4 provide an interesting contrast to Table 2. One would expect that, in the long run, houhold portfolios would reflect the financing patterns of firms. Since internal finance accrues to equity holders, one might expect that equity would be much more important in Japan, France and Germany. There are, of cour, differences in the d
ata ts underlying the different tables. For example, houhold portfolios consist of financial asts and exclude privately held firms, whereas the sources-and-us-of-funds data include all firms. Nevertheless, it ems unlikely that the differences could cau such huge discrepancies. It is puzzling that the different ways of viewing the financial system produce such radically different results.
