THE FINANCIAL CRISES, INCOME LEVELS AND BANKING AND INSURANCE

Abstract

We investigate the impact of the 2008-2009 Global Crisis on banking and insurance around the world. Using World Bank’s classification, we examine the impact on high-income OECD, high-income non-OECD, middle-income, and low-income countries. We examine how the crisis affected seven banking-related variables and two insurancerelated variables. First, we test to see if there was any sign of an upcoming crisis in each group before the crisis started. Our results show that in none of the country-income groups, there was a sign of an upcoming crisis. In other words, there was no significant change in any of the banking or insurance variables during the year preceding the crisis. Then, we test to see the impact of the crisis on these variables for each group. We do not see a significant impact on any of these variables during the crisis year. Finally, we examine the long-run impact of the crisis on these variables for each group and we find that, liquid liabilities went up significantly just after the crisis. Therefore, we conclude that middle-income countries were affected more than the other groups in terms of banks’ liquid liabilities going up significantly.

Keywords

• banking
• insurance
• global crisis
• financial crisis