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Among transitional economies, Poland was a pioneer in bank and enterprise restructuring, tackling it through innovative pro tempore legislation which linked bank recapitalization to improvements in the bank's operating systems, aiming at increasing efficiency and loan recovery. The approach encouraged banks to play a central role in enterprise restructuring. In this paper, the authors critically and comprehensively analyze the Polish approach, presenting and discussing its pros and cons, describing the program's implementation, and providing a preliminary evaluation of the results. One result is that the banking sector now resembles that of a modern market economy in its structure, efficiency, and profitability; sector competition is increasing; interest rates are declining; and the menu of financial services is growing. It is not yet clear whether enterprises have been put on a permanently healthy and viable path, although some positive results noted are linked to the central role of banks in enterprise governance, such as maintaining incentives to avoid unloading debt onto the government, resolving conflicts between creditors without triggering unnecessary liquidations, and avoiding excessive use of bankruptcy procedures. The general lesson is that bank recapitalizations have to be accompanied by additional restructuring measures to resuscitate the banking sector, which may serve as the engine to successfully drive enterprise restructuring.

This chapter relates the experience of the Money and Finance Research Group (MoFiR) established almost two decades ago within the Department of Economics of UNIVPM. The MoFiR main research focus has been the analysis of the evolution of the financial system on the development of economic systems. This chapter synthetizes some of the authors’ main contributions on three main lines of research: the international and European monetary systems, the relationship between banking structures and local development, and the potential discriminatory effects of regulatory policies. In all these issues the main point of reference has been the impact of the evolution of financial structure and regulation on different territories (countries, regions, local systems) characterized by different levels of development. The authors argue that this point of interest should be maintained in any future study on the transformations of the financial system, included the evolving situations of different territories and bank-firm relationships. What has to be always considered crucial is the understanding of how structural changes generate and distribute benefits, risks, and losses within and among economies.

This paper offers a methodological contribution to the empirical analysis of the relationships between banking and economic growth by suggesting a new indicator for the state of development of the banking system based on a measure of bank microeconomic efficiency. This choice helps to overcome the problem of causality and to capture the effects of the banks' allocative activity. This new approach is then applied to analyse the relationship between the banking system and economic growth in the Italian regions, through a dynamic panel technique. The empirical results show the existence of an independent effect exerted by the efficiency of banks on regional growth.