The horizontal axis shows each country's trade openness as measured by the sum of its imports and exports as a fraction of its nominal GDP in 2007. BIS Review 128/2009  3  the crisis in China, India, and Indonesia, but, as exhibit 2 shows, even those fast-growing economies experienced noticeable declines in growth relative to their earlier trends.
In countries with strong traditions of bureaucratic control over economic decisionmaking, consolidating the regulatory function may prove counterproductive because that agency would have tremendous power and few checks and balances. Further, such consolidation is likely to be a larger problem if the supervisory agency is not independent of other government functions.