Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine, (2000), "A New Database on Financial Development and Structure," World Bank Economic Review 14, 597-605.

Thorsten Beck and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, "Financial Institutions and Markets Across Countries and over Time: Data and Analysis", World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4943, May 2009.

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. 

We have again updated the more popular data series from the Financial Structure database through 2009. Revised: November 2010. The revised dataset has some additional variables (two indicators of deposits in banks and in financial institutions relative to GDP added in 2007, and included in this latest update, some standard banking variables (ROE, ROA, cost-income ratio and z-score) as well as some measures of financial globalization: outstanding and net issues of international debt to GDP, loans from non-resident banks to GDP, off-shore deposits to domestic bank deposits, and remittance inflows to GDP.

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Pam Gill, Baybars Karacaovali and Edward Al-Hussainy with this update. Please note that most metrics have been recalculated for the entire time period to ensure consistency over time. The file contains a sheet with definitions and sources; for more detailed definitions and detailed description of the sources, please see the working paper below.

This new database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time is unique in that it unites a range of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets.

The compiled data permit 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.

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 the authors in recent papers. A description of this data is also included in the file (the file is a self-extracting zip file: download the file, do a File, Run, and the files will be extracted).

Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Levine describe the sources and construction of, and the intuition behind, different indicators and present descriptive statistics.