The most recent waves followed the liberalization of the early 1980s and the expansion of subsidiaries and branches in emerging and developing economies since the second half of the 1990s. Measured by the expansion of cross-border lending and the local claims of foreign banks, the scale of international banking increased dramatically since the beginning of 1980s, also in the Gulf States (Figure 1).
While international claims vis-à-vis developing countries are less than 20 percent of claims to developed countries, there has been a recent acceleration of the former.