Financial System Classification: From Conventional Dichotomy to a More Modern View

This paper is to provide literature review on traditional financial system classification and offer and alternative classification of financial systems. Conventional wisdom holds that there are basically 2 types of financial systems – bank-based and market-based. But modern research points to the fact that such opinion may be quite biased. We consider several functions of financial system (not only financing, but corporate governance and information dissemination) and construct a database of financial metrics and institutional variables is order to conduct cluster-analysis. Our findings include: dichotomy does not hold; institutional environment is a key driver of financial system development; commodity exporters have inadequately low institutional development level.