After Southern Italy became part of a new, national state in 1860, its financial sector was radically transformed under Piedmontese influence. This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the aggressive penetration of a Northern credit institution, the future Bank of Italy, into the South following unification harmed the local banking system and highlights instead its transformative role in modernising and deepening regional credit markets. On the basis of new statistics, banking and political records, this contribution shows that the introduction of ‘foreign’ banking from Northern Italy under the auspices of a national, constitutional government resulted in a financial revolution and a democratisation of credit supply to the advantage of the whole South. Public banking under the Bourbons had privileged the needs of an absolute government over those of the private economy and of the capital city over those of the rest of the country, retarding financial development. Credit undersupply and regional fragmentation could only be overcome through the integration of the South within a larger Italian market, in which, however, the lion's share went to a predominantly Northern institution.

This research demonstrates that international financial integration changes the way in which financial development affects inequality within a country. Specifically, both cross-country analysis and dynamic panel data analysis using data collected from more than 100 countries provide evidence indicating that if the financial market of a country is strongly closed to the world market, financial development narrows inequality within that country, whereas if the financial market of a country is strongly open to the world market, financial development widens inequality within that country. Our theoretical framework provides a possible explanation for our empirical findings.

Financial crises, and in particular those of the past few years, have severe consequences for the affected economies. In this paper we analyse the impact of financial development and European financial integration on growth and we find no reversal of the growth benefits of financial development and integration in recent years. This highlights the economic cost of regulatory changes that would reverse European financial integration. We also find that, following a financial crisis, investment declines more in countries with a greater degree of uncertainty aversion, which can be informative for evaluating post-crisis economic performance.

This article considers the nature of the rules that would need to exist to enable a satisfactory regulatory regime for cross-border banks in Europe in the light of the present crisis. It sets out first what would need to apply in normal circumstances when banks are sound before going to consider how earlier coordinated intervention and ultimately resolution before capital is eroded can be achieved. It suggests in particular that harmonising the detail of regulatory systems would be very time-consuming but not strike at the heart of the problem which is how countries can cooperate across legal boundaries and the structure that banks would need to have to make this feasible. It concludes by exploring the institutional structures that might make this possible, suggesting that if any new European level body is needed, the most important would be a resolution agency as demonstrated by US experience.

On admet généralement que la mobilité internationale serait devenue très forte à la suite de la libéralisation et de l'intégration financière des vingt dernières années. De façon surprenante, la plupart des travaux empiriques « à la Feldstein-Horioka » ne valident cette hypothèse. Une reconsidération de ces estimations conduit toutefois à des résultats neufs. Les tests, même classiques, confortent l'idée d'un accroissement à long terme de la mobilitéet la tendance s'est accentuée depuis le début des années quatre-vingt. Tous les pays industrialisés, grands ou petits, sont concernés par cette augmentation; la globalisation financière marque néanmoins une frontière entre ces pays et les pays émergents pour lesquels l'investissement demeure dépendant de l'épargne intérieure. Dans l'ensemble, la décorrélation entre investissement et épargne se manifeste par une plus grande autonomie des flux de capitaux. La relation linéaire entre investissement et épargne pivote autour d'un point fixe représenté par le taux d'épargne mondial. Le positionnement des pays par rapport à ce point fixe permet d'établir une typologie robuste qui remet en cause l'idée reçue selon laquelle tous les pays seraient égaux devant la globalisation financière.