By and large, EU financial integration has been a success story. Still, the reform agenda is far from finished. What are the remaining challenges? What are the gains of closer financial market integration? This IMF book tracks the European Union's journey along the path to a single financial market and identifies the challenges and priorities that remain ahead. It pays particular attention to the most recent integration efforts in the European Union following the introduction of the euro. The study looks at the importance of financial integration, in particular for economic growth, the interplay between banks and markets, and equity market integration. It closely examines the relationship between financial integration and financial stability. This interaction presents the European Union with a challenge, but also with the opportunity to play a pioneering role in developing a regional approach to financial stability that could provide lessons for the rest of the world.

The European Union is creating a Financial Union with a European Banking Union and a Capital Markets Union in reaction to lessons learned from incomplete financial markets integration, the Global Financial Crisis and European Sovereign Debt Crisis. This book critically analyses these projects for a more integrated, resilient and sustainable financial system at a time when the United Kingdom as the member state with the most developed capital markets and the leading global and European financial center, the City of London, is leaving the Union. Neoliberal financial globalization and markets integration policies have led to finance-led capitalism that caused the crises. By building on pre-crises integration ideas, the Union revives and expands the reach of capital markets-based financing and shadow banking. The book discusses the consequences of deeper integration and the future of European financial centers advocating an alternative financial markets integration based on theories explaining finacialization and finance-led capitalism.

The last decade has seen the increasing integration of European financial markets due to a number of factors including the creation of a common regulatory framework, the liberalisation of international capital movements, financial deregulation, advances in technology and the introduction of the Euro. However, the process of integration has proceeded largely in the absence of any comprehensive legal regulation, and has rather been constructed on the basis of sectorial provisions dictated by the needs of cross-border transactions. This has meant that many legal barriers still remain as obstacles to complete integration. This book considers the discipline of monetary obligations within the wider context of financial markets. The book provides a comparative and transnational examination of the legal rules which form the basis of transactions on financial markets. Analysing the integration of the markets from a legal point of view provides an opportunity to highlight the role of globalisation as the key element favouring the circulation of rules, models, and especially the development of new regulatory sources. The book examines market transactions and the institutes at the root of these transactions, including the type of legislative sources in force and the subjects acting as legislators. The first part of the book concentrates on the micro-discipline of money, debts, payments and financial instruments. The second part goes on to analyse the macro-context of integration of the markets, looking at the persistence of legal barriers and options for their removal, as well as the development of new legal sources as a consequence of the transfer of monetary and political sovereignty. Finally, the book draws links between the two parts and assesses the consequences of the changes at the macro-level of regulation on the micro-level of legal discipline of monetary obligations, particularly focusing on the emergence and growing importance of soft law.

Since the creation of the euro and a European Central Bank, the European Union has persistently pursued financial market integration throughout periods of economic growth, membership enlargements, financial breakdown, and political crisis. While traditionally analysed in terms of clashing ideological orientations and strategic political interests, this book presents a novel and empirically grounded perspective on the issues around financial market integration by approaching them in terms of the knowledge problems that actors face. Drawing on European legal texts, policy documents and interviews with regulators, central bankers, and financial market professionals, this book is rich in empirical detail which reveals a close-knit set of knowledge problems, or paradoxes, of ‘the market’. These paradoxes are irreducible to a particular political ideology or national interests because they are rooted in the conceptual structure of the European treaties. Moreover, while these knowledge problems present themselves as uncertainties, tensions, and conflicts in practice, they also echo persistent conceptual and theoretical controversies in the field of economics. Indeed, this book demonstrates how ‘the market’ is adopted from economic theory into European treaty law, resulting in central bankers and regulators struggling with knowledge problems and conflicts paralleling classic debates in the academic discipline. This book will be of significant interest to political economists working on European economic integration and money and finance as well as readers of heterodox economics, economic sociology, and political and social theory more broadly.

Over the decade or so since the global financial crisis rocked EU financial markets and led to wide-ranging reforms, EU securities and financial markets regulation has continued to evolve. The legislative framework has been refined and administrative rulemaking has expanded. Alongside, the Capital Markets Union agenda has developed, the UK has left the EU, and ESMA has emerged as a decisive influence on EU financial markets governance. All these developments, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, have shaped the regulatory landscape and how supervision is organized. EU Securities and Financial Markets Regulation provides a comprehensive, critical, and contextual account of the intricate rulebook that governs EU financial markets and its supporting institutional arrangements. It is framed by an assessment of how the regime has evolved over the decade or so since the global financial crisis and considers, among other matters, the post-crisis reforms to key legislative measures, the massive expansion of administrative rulemaking and of soft law, the Capital Markets Union agenda, the development of supervisory convergence as the means for organizing pan-EU supervision, and ESMA's role in EU financial markets governance. Its coverage extends from capital-raising and the Prospectus Regulation to financial market intermediation and the MiFID II/MiFIR and IFD/IFR regimes, to the new regulatory regimes adopted since the global financial crisis (including for benchmarks and their administrators), to retail market regulation and the PRIIPs Regulation, and on to the EU's third country regime and the implications of the UK's departure from the EU. This is the fourth edition of the highly successful and authoritative monograph first published as EC Securities Regulation. Heavily revised from the third edition to reflect developments since the global financial crisis, it adopts the in-depth contextual and analytical approach of earlier editions and so considers the market, political, institutional, and international context of the regulatory and supervisory regime.

Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this textbook provides a fresh analysis of the European financial system.

Since the first edition of this book, the world's financial system went through its greatest crisis for a century. What made this crisis unique is that severe financial problems emerged simultaneously in many different countries and that its economic impact was felt throughout the world as a result of the increased interconnectedness of the global economy. Written for undergraduate and graduate students of finance, economics and business, the second edition of this successful textbook provides a fresh analysis of the world financial system in light of the recent financial crisis. Combining theory, empirical data and policy, it examines and explains financial markets, financial infrastructures, financial institutions and challenges in the domain of financial supervision and competition policy. This new edition features three completely new chapters, one on financial crises, a second on financial innovation, and, on the policy side, a third on the monetary policy of the European Central Bank.

Problems of integration and globalisation and the implications of such processes on individual countries have been on the spotlight of the economic debate among economists and politicians over the last decade. Both developed and developing countries are involved in the processes of trade and capital liberalisation, with the extent of gain or loss depending on their ability to explore the newly arising opportunities and to adapt their economies to the new international environment. This volume analyses some of these challenges brought by the movements towards a higher regional integration and higher international interdependency.

Insurance Market Integration in the European Union offers an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms of insurance market integration and measures the degrees of this integration. It examines the operation of the EU single financial market and, against this backdrop, the regulation relating to the insurance market. In addition, the book focuses on the specificity and determinants of international insurance market development and the issues with assimilation set against other financial market segments such as money market, credit-deposit and bond and equity. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of insurance market integration on an international scale. The authors propose a unique approach to the subject in the context of the EU and particularly in relation to the European area. They also apply new measures of insurance market integration in the EU in practice through the use of statistical data and implementation of econometric modeling. Further, they investigate how the financial and fiscal crisis has affected the insurance market in EU countries and the impact of European Central Bank monetary policy on the degrees of integration in the European area during and after the financial crisis. This book will find an audience among academics and researchers in the fields of international economics and finance and applied, financial and growth economics.

This edited collection assesses the level of financial integration in the European Union (EU) and the differences across the countries and segments of the EU financial system. Progress in financial integration is key to the EU’s economic growth and competitiveness and although it has advanced substantially, the process is still far from completion. This book focuses on the pace of financial integration in the EU with special emphasis on the new EU Member States and investigates their progress in comparison with ‘old’ EU countries. The book is the first of its kind to include and evaluate the effects of the global financial crisis on the process of EU financial integration. In particular, the book’s contributors address the issue of whether a high degree of financial integration contributed to the intensification of the financial crisis, or whether a low level of integration prevented countries and financial industries from some of the negative effects of the crisis. Although most of the chapters apply contemporary econometric tools, the technical part is always reduced to indispensable minimum and the emphasis is given to economic interpretation of the results. The book aims to offer an up to date and insightful examination of the process of financial integration in the EU today.