^*Abdul Abiad and Thierry Tressel are senior economists with the IMF Research Department. Enrica Detragiache is an advisor with the IMF Institute. The authors are grateful to Aart Kraay, Ashoka Mody, Antonio Spilimbergo, and Barbara Stallings for helpful comments and suggestions. The latest version of this database could not have been completed without the expert contributions of Sawa Omori, Kruti Bharucha, and Adil Mohommad. The authors also thank Radu Paun and Eun-Jue Chung for excellent research assistance.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new database of financial reforms covering 91 economies over 1973–2005. It describes the content of the database, the information sources utilized, and the coding rules used to create an index of financial reform. It also compares the database with other measures of financial liberalization, provides descriptive statistics, and discusses some possible applications. The database provides a multifaceted measure of reform, covering seven aspects of financial sector policy. Along each dimension the database provides a graded (rather than a binary) score, and allows for reversals.