IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v37y2021i1p152-171..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The structure and relations of banking systems: the UK experience and the challenges of ‘levelling-up’

Author

Listed:
  • Colin Mayer
  • Philip McCann
  • Jacob Schumacher

Abstract

A decentralized banking system is marked by geographical dispersion of banks with close proximity of banks to their borrowers and strong long-term relationships between banks and their borrowers based on soft, tacit, as well as hard, codified information. It is important for promoting the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) particularly in regional locations. In contrast, the UK has a highly centralized, concentrated banking system with weak relationships between banks and their borrowers. This has contributed to the high degree of regional disparity across the UK. The programme of ‘levelling up’ regions will require a more decentralized banking system. The cases of Germany, the US, and the Swedish bank Handelsbanken illustrate the advantages of decentralized banking. They also have important lessons for the way in which decentralized banking systems should be structured and organized and, in particular, for the regulatory arrangements that are conducive to their satisfactory functioning and avoidance of pitfalls to which they can otherwise be prone.

Suggested Citation

  • Colin Mayer & Philip McCann & Jacob Schumacher, 2021. "The structure and relations of banking systems: the UK experience and the challenges of ‘levelling-up’," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 37(1), pages 152-171.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:37:y:2021:i:1:p:152-171.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/graa061
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anna Stansbury & Dan Turner & Ed Balls, 2023. "Tackling the UK’s regional economic inequality: binding constraints and avenues for policy intervention," Contemporary Social Science, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3-4), pages 318-356, August.
    2. Flögel, Franz & Hejnová, Tereza, 2021. "The effects of regional banks on economic resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic and the global financial crisis a cross-country comparison of the European countries," IAT Discussion Papers 21/01, Institut Arbeit und Technik (IAT), Westfälische Hochschule, University of Applied Sciences.
    3. Giorgio Barba Navaretti & Anna Cecilia Rosso, 2023. "Access to capital markets and the geography of productivity leaders and laggards," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(1), pages 64-113, January.
    4. Michiel N Daams & Philip McCann & Paolo Veneri & Richard Barkham & Dennis Schoenmaker, 2024. "Capital shocks and the great urban divide," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 24(1), pages 1-21.
    5. Ming Chen & Jiao Wu, 2023. "State ownership may not be bad: Based on bibliometric research (2002–2021)," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 44(2), pages 1285-1304, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:37:y:2021:i:1:p:152-171.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.