Rentabilidad bancaria y desarrollo económico en el siglo XXI: una relación controvertida a nivel mundial[Bank profitability and economic development in the 21st century: a controversial relationship worldwide]

This article contains an essay on the negative empirical relationship between bank profitability and economic development. The working hypothesis is that this relationship is caused by the social (in)efficiency with which the different banking sectors operate. The argument uses public information from the first two decades of the 21st century for almost one hundred and a half countries on the five continents. The topic, although it may seem very specialized, is of general interest. Firstly, because, within the current capitalist economic system, almost no sector of the economy can remain outside the world of finance. And secondly, because the profitability of the financial sector, as a whole, is the result of the degree of (in)efficiency with which it provides its services to the rest of the economic sectors. In theory, financial companies, in general, and banking companies, in particular, should mediate the greatest amount of funds possible in order to be able to more efficiently fulfill their central function (facilitate the allocation and deployment of the economic resources existing in each country), which enables greater economic development. To this end, banks must: (i) encourage the greatest possible domestic savings and (ii) finance investment in all low-risk projects, since high-risk projects require other types of financiers, or even partners. However, banking sectors stop operating as efficiently as they could when, in order to increase their profitability, they widen the differentials between their interest rates as much as possible, or even encourage the partial dollarization with which they operate. These practices mean that: (i) savings in national currency are discouraged by the low real returns provided to savers, (ii) low-risk projects are not financially viable, since, by their nature, they have lower returns, and (iii) economies are more vulnerable to the unpredictable change in the risk appetite of foreign capital and its overflow through the evolution of the exchange rate.