ABSTRACT
The metaphor of financial landscapes cautions us right from the start against too easy assumptions about the dynamics of financial intermediaries and relations between borrowers, lenders and savers. “The landscape metaphor allows us to develop different contextual approaches for the analysis and evaluation of financial services in interlinked processes related to the development of state administrations, markets and communities. The official leaning towards discoloring of financial maps is reinforced by the fact that planners and consultants of development agencies persistently ignore the existence of financial curb markets. Multi-disciplinary approaches are called for to analyze and explain the diversity in forms of financial intermediation and the interrelations existing between them, in regulatory frameworks of financial intermediation, in scale and volume of operations and the variations that occur in time and space. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
