Banking crises include bank runs, which affect single banks; banking panics, which affect many banks; and systemic banking crises, in which a country experiences many defaults and financial institutions and corporations face great difficulties repaying contracts.
[1] A banking crisis is marked by bank runs that lead to the demise of financial institutions, or by the demise of a financial institution that starts a string of similar demises.
Reinhart, Carmen M.; Rogoff, Kenneth S. (2009).
This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
Taylor, Alan M. The great leveraging.
Number of countries having a banking crisis in each year since 1800. This is based on
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
, which covers only 70 countries. The general upward trend might be attributed to many factors. One of these is a gradual historical increase in the percent of people who receive money for their labor. Another, elsewhere suggested reason related to more recent development trends and to banking crisis during modern era might be changes in the size of banking sector compared to overall GDP. The dramatic feature of this graph is the virtual absence of banking crises during the period of the
Bretton Woods agreement
, 1945 to 1971. This analysis is similar to Figure 10.1 in Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). For more details see the help file for "bankingCrises" in the Ecdat package available from the
Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).
