Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe, Martín Uribe
After a period of widespread financial instability in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly concentrated among commodity exporters, only a handful of developing countries have been hit by systemic banking crises over the past two decades. Several factors have contributed to this state of affairs, including an extended period of sustained economic growth, financial deepening, and favourable external conditions, most notably a protracted period of stable and high commodity prices. Figure 1 shows that banking crises in low-income countries are clustered between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when commodity prices declined and volatility increased, especially at the high end of the distribution. By contrast, crises have been almost absent in the 2000s, in correspondence with the commodity super-cycle. But since ‘graduation’ from banking crises has so far proven elusive (Reinhart et al. 2010), when the commodity super-cycle came to an end in the mid-2010s, bank profitability and asset quality declined in an ever-increasing number of developing countries. The recent increase in government arrears in several Sub-Saharan countries, due to the need to finance Covid-19 relief packages, may worsen the situation and increase the likelihood of triggering a banking crisis (Bosio et al. 2021).