Capital Blight? The Regulation of Financial Institutions in Italy and Canada

Abstract

The pressures of globalization and capital flight create two sets of challenges for national state structures. They are seen fo limit the boundaries of state action, and within those boundaries, they lead to a transfer of regulatory capacity to supra and/or subnational structures. The article explores the second set of challenges and asks whether globalization has led to uniform changes in the regulatory capacity of national states in the area of financial institutions. It argues that the Italian and Canadian experiences suggest that political and institutional factors may shape how national states respond to the pressure to shift regulatory capacity to structures at some other level. In the Italian case, the emergence of a single market for banking in Europe led to a strengthening of the state's policymaking capacity. In Canada, on the other hand, the federal government's authority was limited by competition with provincial regulatory regimes. Globalization may limit the boundaries of state action, but this does not necessarily mean that those boundaries will not be occupied primarily by national state structures.