Thorsten Beck, Aslı Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine, (2000), "A New Database on Financial Development and Structure," World Bank Economic Review 14, 597-605. (An earlier version was issued as World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2146.)

Thorsten Beck, Aslı Demirgüç-Kunt, and Ross Levine, "Financial Institutions and Markets Across Countries and over Time: Data and Analysis", World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4943, May 2009.

Martin Čihák, Aslı Demirgüç-Kunt, Erik Feyen, and Ross Levine, “Benchmarking Financial Development Around the World”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6175, August 2012.

Disclaimer: These data are provided on an "as-is" basis and their accuracy is not guaranteed by the World Bank. All errors are the authors' own.

This database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time includes a range of indicators (31 indicators in total), starting from 1960, that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets.

The compiled data permits the construction of financial structure indicators to measure whether, for example, a country's banks are larger, more active, and more efficient than its stock markets. These indicators can then be used to investigate the empirical link between the legal, regulatory, and policy environment and indicators of financial structure. They can also be used to analyze the implications of financial structure for economic growth.

Latest version of the dataset:
April 2013 version of the dataset

The Financial Development and Structure dataset has been last updated in April 2013 and it now contains data through 2011. Similar to its previous, September 2012 version, the revised dataset covers 203 jurisdictions, removing seven jurisdictions (American Samoa, Channel Islands, Greenland, Guam, Mayotte, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico) for absence of data, while including three jurisdictions (Kosovo, San Marino, and Tuvalu) that were not covered in the previous iterations of the dataset. Taiwan and Netherland Antilles are also removed for reasons of consistency with the Global Financial Development Database.

All indicators have been recalculated for the entire time period to ensure higher quality and consistency over time. The file contains a sheet with definitions and sources. For more detailed definitions and detailed descriptions of the underlying sources, please see the working papers below.

Research assistance by Amin Mohseni-Cheraghlou and Subika Farazi was instrumental in this update.

There is an additional compressed file containing files with macroeconomic and institutional data averaged over the period 1980-95 that have been used as dependent or controlling variables by some of the authors in recent papers. To access the compressed file please click on this self-extracting zip file: download the file, do a File, Run, and the files will be extracted.

Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Levine (2000) describe the sources and construction of, and the intuition behind, different indicators and present descriptive statistics of the Financial Development and Structure dataset. Čihák, Demirgüç-Kunt, Feyen, and Levine (2012) discuss the related Global Financial Development Database, which encompasses all the statistics from the Financial Development and Structure dataset, plus several additional series.

Older versions of the dataset:
September 2012 and November 2010 version of the dataset