IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/11044.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Determinants of Bank Interest Spreads in Tajikistan

Author

Listed:
  • Pietro Calice

Abstract

Despite far-reaching banking sector reforms over the past few years, financial intermediation in Tajikistan continues to lag behind structural peers and the Caucasus and Central Asia region. At the same time, bank interest rate spreads, a standard measure of financial intermediation costs, have remained significantly higher than those of peers, ranking among the highest in the world. This paper examines the determinants of interest rate spreads in Tajikistan using a bank-level panel data set for the first quarter of 2011 to the fourth quarter of 2022. The findings show that bank-specific factors, particularly income diversification, loan size, risk aversion, market power, credit risk, and the macroeconomic and institutional environment within which banks operate, explain a large proportion of cross-bank, cross-time variation in spreads. The results suggest that there is ample room to promote economies of scale and enhance competition in the banking system while strengthening the operating environment.

Suggested Citation

  • Pietro Calice, 2025. "Determinants of Bank Interest Spreads in Tajikistan," Policy Research Working Paper Series 11044, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11044
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099455001242534421/pdf/IDU-8b3f9938-0538-4eee-8626-038198a61d78.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:wbk:wbrwps:11044. 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: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    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.