"Militarisation: A Political Clue to Financial Structures?"
Résumé
[Premières lignes] Studies of financial systems are very often concerned with finding one main factor which determines whether
or why the financial system of a country can be categorised as a ‘market based system’ or a ‘bank based system’. Explanations for why a country would adhere to one type or to the other can roughly be divided into structural or developmental. The first category of explanations relies on institutional factors such as the legal basis, the distribution of political power and so on which exert a constant and long-term influence on the financial structures.
The second category is more concerned with the pattern of economic and financial development over time, and relies on the link between specific difficulties or challenges (regional imbalances, information asymmetry, relative backwardness) and the build-up of institutional solutions to these difficulties.
Academic historians tend to rely more on the second approach, which lets them expand historical explanations and careful contextual analysis.
There are two common conclusions to these distinctly different types of explanations. First, the convergence of financial systems is not only possible, it is more or less bound to take place given an open international goods or capital market. Second, path dependency is a very strong
feature of financial systems, which can be explained by the ability of a complex set of institutions to harness and resist ‘pure’ market forces. In that respect, recent work by Youssef Cassis offers a vivid picture of the long-standing resistance of most financial centres to the relative decline of the national economies that host them.
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