Mapping banking centres globally since 1970

Publishing date: 12 July 2022
Authors: Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol Aliénor Cameron

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Brexit and the rise of China as a leading international economic power have revived discussions about the geography of banking centres. This paper analyses the geographical evolution of banking centres since the 1970s, based on a database constructed from a ranking of the top banks in the world created by The Banker magazine, a UK-based monthly publication specialised in international financial affairs. We describe both how the database was created and the ways in which it can be used to inform policy on money and capital markets. We address why the data can be used to proxy the size of International Financial Centres (IFCs) and the methodological limitations it may present. We find that banking consolidations and the evolution of the legal framework are more central to the changing geography of banking centres than economic and financial crises. We also highlight that, despite major shifts in global economic power, leading banking centres are hard to replace.

The authors are grateful to Catarina Martins and Felipe Antileo for excellent research assistance, as well as Thibaud Giddey and Bruegel colleagues for comments.

Recommended citation:
Mourlon-Druol, E. and A. Cameron (2022) ‘Mapping banking centres globally since 1970’, Working Paper 12/2022, Bruegel

About the authors

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol is a Non-resident Fellow at Bruegel. He specialises in international economic history, particularly the history of European economic cooperation and integration.

He covers the European Union’s Economic and Monetary Union; the development of international and European banking regulation and supervision, especially the origins of the European banking union; European Public Goods; the rise of both global and European economic governance; the international debt crises of the 1980s, particularly in Eastern Europe; and the history of capitalism, neoliberalism and their relationship with European integration.

He speaks English, Italian and German.

He is also a Professor of History of European Cooperation and Integration at the European University Institute (EUI, Florence), and Co-Director of the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre. Previously, he was a Bruegel Visiting Fellow, a Professor at the University of Glasgow and has held visiting and research positions at institutions including the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Keio University and Columbia University. He holds a PhD in History and Civilisation from EUI, Florence.
Aliénor Cameron

Aliénor worked at Bruegel as a Research Assistant Intern. She holds an Undergraduate degree in Economics and Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and is currently working towards her Master’s degree in International Economic Policy, with minors in environmental policy and quantitative methods. She is expected to graduate from Sciences Po Paris in 2021.

Before joining Bruegel, Aliénor worked as a Research Assistant for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Paris School of Economics. In this role, she worked on a project which studied the effects of trade openness in developing countries on local populations’ access to highly processed foods and the resulting health implications.

Aliénor also worked for Le Cercle des Economistes as a project manager, and was in charge of writing the think tank’s annual position paper. Before that, she interned at Regulatory Economics Group, a consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area specialized in energy economics and regulation.

Aliénor is a dual French and American citizen and is fluent in English, French and Spanish.