Unified Financial Services Supervision in Latvia, the United Kingdom and Scandinavian Countries
AbstractThis paper examines recent institutional and structural developments relating to unified financial services supervision in Latvia, the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries. Over the years, financial regulation and supervision, in many countries, has been organized around specialist agencies that have distinct and separate responsibilities for banking, securities and insurance sectors. But there has been an apparent trend towards restructuring the financial supervisory function in many countries in recent years, and in particular unified regulatory agencies-that is, agencies that supervise two or more of these areas. The paper argues that until there is a longer track record of experience with unified agencies, it is difficult to come to firm conclusions about the optimal structure of such agencies. In some countries, and for various reasons, some of which are political, the unification of all the major financial services regulatory bodies is desirable whereas it might not be appropriate to do so in a country that has a financial sector with limited inter-connectedness among the various sector components and, further still, where there is no practice of universal banking nor evidence of conglomerates. |