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Poised between stellar growth and a spectacular new collapse.

Further banking sector consolidation is on the cards in South Africa, analysts predict, as projected GDP growth of more than 4% for 2005 tempts foreign players in.

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When Caja Madrid's management realized it had little scope to expand in domestic retail banking, it sought new markets both in Spain and overseas

After months of debate about the number of companies to be reprivatized, progress is made

Latin nations' equity and debt markets are seeing greater issuance activity

Public-sector banks in Europe have hit on a new and potentially profitable idea. They're trying to turn themselves into localised versions of the universal banking model. Who are some of the successful early movers? And we look at how Europe's cooperative banks are teaming up in debt capital markets.

From electronic trading platforms to credit event fixings, inter-dealer broker Creditex regularly sets the pace in the electronic credit derivatives trading. But the market didn't know quite how to take spin-off of its post-trade processing platform T-Zero.

Jihad Azour, Lebanon's finance minister, was director of UN Development Programme and World Bank projects at the ministry before his cabinet appointment in July 2005. He talks to Kate Luxford about Lebanon's economic priorities

High oil prices threaten Kazakhstan's economy with inflationary pressures.

Erste Bank handed control of its branch network to local savings banks, and went to work on creating products they could sell.

To obtain the overall country risk score, Euromoney assigns a weighting to nine categories. These are political risk (25% weighting), economic performance (25%), debt indicators (10%), debt in default or rescheduled (10%), credit ratings (10%), access to bank finance (5%), access to short-term finance (5%), access to capital markets (5%), forfaiting (5%).