The East Asian banking sector—overweight?

Commentaries

Table 1. The top twenty countries according to the number of the world biggest 1000 banks
headquartered in them.

column stating the location of bank headquarters and prepare the ranking of countries
according to the number of the world's biggest banks they host, we will get table 1.

In the table we find 9 Asian, 8 European, 2 Latin American countries, and the
USA. Within Europe the very strong positions of the German-speaking countries may
appear surprising. Even Austria takes a very high place, in front of France! Apart from
France, a surprisingly low position is occupied by the United Kingdom, especially in
relation to Spain. As already mentioned, Asia leads in the category of continents. The
most striking feature of the table is the massive presence of East Asian countries apart
from Japan. There are 7 of them: all of the newly industrialising economies except
Singapore and 4 leading emerging economies. Together they hosted 140 of the world's
top banks. This means that countries creating about 5% of global GDP ⁽¹⁾ were the
headquarters location for 14% of the world's largest banks.

The list published by The Banker also allows us to prepare a ranking by city
(table 2). Here, we meet 9 East Asian names, including 7 outside of Japan. The number
is not surprising, because they are all simply the capitals of the countries identified in
the first table. Now their positions are even higher than previously. Taipei leads the
table, and quite decisively so, and 5 of its neighbours from the region qualified in the
top 10. Six non-Japanese East Asian cities in the top 10 of world banking! As for the
capital of Taiwan it is interesting to recall a citation from Underhill:

''The Taiwanese state has made it an explicit goal to transform Taipei into a regional
financial centre with potential to displace the status currently held by Hong Kong''
(1997, page 223).

From the table it seems that Taipei has more than achieved the goal, at least in terms
of numbers, surpassing not only Hong Kong but also London, Tokyo, and Paris.

The above two tables do not exhaust the potential of The Banker's list. If we
look, for example, at the Japanese banks we can observe many banks headquartered

⁽¹⁾ The author's estimate based on the OECD Statistical Compendium Database.

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