Banking in Africa: The Impact of Financial Sector Reform Since Independence

1 The difficulty of reversing earlier reforms Nearly all African countries introduced reforms to liberalize their financial sectors in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These recent reforms were in many ways an attempt to reverse the financial sector reforms changes which had been widely implemented 30 years earlier, in the post-independence period. In this first set of reforms, implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, governments intervened extensively in the financial sector. Newly independent governments believed strongly that credit should be allocated according to national development objectives, and that this was not being done by the banks which were then operating. In strong contrast, financial sector reform of the 1980s and early 1990s, financial liberalization, was based on the opposite belief, that development would be better pursued if banks were to lend using commercial criteria, without any direct government intervention. Three related themes are explored in this...