This article examines how and why renowned Republican-era Chinese firms raised debt capital to finance their businesses by accepting savings deposits from ordinary people instead of borrowing from financial institutions. The article argues that in the absence of a powerful unitary state and centralized financial institutions, Chinese firms innovated sophisticated, decentralized financial instruments capable of amassing large quantities of capital from a broad host of depositors without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Savings deposits not only provided these firms with a cheaper and more flexible source of debt capital than that on offer from banks but also they fueled the Chinese economy by creating a sizable credit supply, a phenomenon that Chinese business and financial history scholarship focusing on the role of indigenous and modern banks has hitherto largely neglected.

The transnational governance of bank resolution must be well-designed to provide credible solutions to financial crisis management. While at policy level, there is a broad consensus on best practice, the implementation stage often leaves something to be desired. Focusing on the implementation of the relevant Financial Stability Board (FSB) recommendations in the EU, this article explores this issue and proposes certain reforms. It argues for closer EU control and scrutiny over national decision-making without, however advocating a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Its main insight is that the promotion of transnational convergence need not come at the expense of the distinctive attentiveness of EU law to local conditions nor indeed involve a massive shake-up of the existing EU architecture. Its aim is to contribute to scholarly and public policy debates in this field in anticipation of the EU response to the final conclusions of the post-implementation evaluation of the FSB recommendations, which is currently in progress.

The economic decline of Italy between the mid-1990s and the outset of the financial crisis is a critical case in European political economy because its model of capitalism was deeply reformed at the time when its decline commenced. This paper argues that the Italian economic stagnation cannot be attributed to the lack of market-friendly reforms in a globalized economic context, as argued by previous literature. Instead, Italian economic decline is a consequence of institutional change which on the one hand has destroyed previous institutional complementarities, and on the other hand has led to an incoherent, or ‘hybrid,’ capitalist setting. Under the lenses of the Varieties of Capitalism approach, this paper reviews the main reforms in the fields of corporate governance and finance as well as in the labor market. It shows that such reforms established new institutions alternatively apt to support both strategic coordination and market coordination, resulting in institutional incoherence, and mixed incentives. In the short-run, incoherent reforms have reduced the availability of capital to SMEs; in the longer-run, they failed to give actors incentives to pursue innovation. This paper contributes theories of economic growth/decline focused on the supply-side of the economy and it is compatible with other – non-rival – explanations focused on the demand-side.