ABSTRACT
Harry M. Makler and Walter L. Ness, Jr. Introduction1 Credit allocation (lending) and the role of banks in this process has been the focus of social science for several decades yet the emphasis has been more on the supply rather than the demand side. If one is concerned with the growth and development of markets, be they nations or entire regions, the focus should be equally on both. Rather than only studying which intermediaries are supplying credit and how much they are allocating, there should be more emphasis on who receives credit, who is actually borrowing, what volume they are borrowing and what interest rate and other costs they are paying. Until such studies are performed we have to be content with supply side analyses, but even in this area, scholarship has not gone very far in differentiating among banks and comparing their lending with that of other financial intermediaries.
