Banking for Growth

The absence of a robust small and medium-sized ("SMEs") formal business sector - or the "missing middle" - has long been identified as both a contributing factor and a distinguishing characteristic of many countries. Many reasons have been advanced to explain the "missing middle" including the inability of SMEs to access bank-based credit. This book compares the relative merits of recent legal reforms that have emerged to address the lack of bank-based credit by considering the way in which recent reforms support the independent and inter-active roles of the stakeholders to the financial intermediation pro-cess. An historical description and comparison of the laws impacting the various stakeholders to bank-based financial intermediation in Canada, the United States, Britain and Taiwan provides the foun-dation on which the analysis of current reforms which encourage "downscaling" of commercial banks and/or "upscaling" of microcredit lenders are considered.