Financial Intermediation in a Less Developed Economy: The History of the United Bank of India

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SAGE Publications, Aug 5, 2008 - Business & Economics - 328 pages
Financial Intermediation in a Less Developed Economy: The History of the United Bank of India is an institutional narrative of a bank in a developing economy, a representative case study that brings out the essential two-way relationship between finance and economic development.

The book highlights that to understand financial intermediation, western theoretical models need to be complemented with institutional narratives of banking in developing economies, given the latter`s specific foci. Thus, the authors choose a bank with significant history in a less developed economy and analyze over 50 years of the bank`s balance sheet data. They trace the bank`s growth in terms of the transaction costs in managing risk, return and liquidity. The discourse also includes important case studies of borrowers after nationalization, a thorough analysis of financial intermediary organization and financial structure, reviews of certain banking policies and suggestion of a methodology to understand the financial history of less developed economies.

This book will be of immense interest to policy makers, researchers and students working in the fields of economics of banking, financial history and development economics.

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About the author (2008)

Indrajit Mallick is a Fellow in Economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. He completed his MA in Economics from Boston University with specialization in Money, Banking and Finance, and Development Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics from Jadavpur University on banking theory and policy. His areas of interest include financial history of less developed countries, economic analysis of law and macroeconomics.

Sugata Marjit is currently the Reserve Bank of India Professor of Industrial Economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He was the first Sukhamay Chakravarty Chair Professor, CESP, Jawaharlal Nehru University and was a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. A topper of Calcutta University he received his Phd in Economics from the University Rochester in 1985. He received the Mahalanobis Gold Medal of the Indian Econometric Society in 2002 and the VKRV Rao National Prize as a young Social Scientist in 2003, among the very few who have received both. He held visiting professorial positions at the Universities of Bonn, Copenhagen, Cornell, Erasmus, Monash, Munich, Konstanz, New South Wales, Queensland, Penn. State, Rochester etc. and was a visiting scholar at the IMF, ADB and the Federal Reserve Bank, St. Louis, USA. His papers have been published in well-known journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Development Economics, European Economic Review, International Economic Review, Canadian Journal of Economics, Economics Letters etc. Oxford University Press, SAGE and Springer-Verlag have published his books and edited volumes.

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