During the same period, the number of foreign banks with subsidiaries or branches in Turkey increased from four to 20. As of November 1998, 60 banks out of 74 are universally commercial banks and the remaining 14 are development and investment banks. Thirty-six of these banks are commercial banks whose majority shares are privately owned; 20 are foreign banks established in Turkey or having branch offices in Turkey; and 14, as noted above, are development and investment banks. As of November 1998, Turkish banks now operate though their 7,062 local branches. More than 165,000 persons are employed in the banking sector. In addition, the Turkish banking system is aggressively modern, adopting every banking innovation rapidly. Turkish banks, operating in parallel with the process of internationalization and globalization, have gone one step further by starting to invest in foreign financial establishments as well. Turkish banks are now able to form joint ventures with foreign banks to open financial subsidiaries and branches abroad. As of November 1998, Turkish banks had 63 financial subsidiaries in 19 different countries, and 26 branches in 10 different countries. As of November 1998, the size of the consolidated balance sheet of the banking sector was $ billion. According to our peer group classification by ownership, public and private banks both have significant shares in the sector.
Such a step would be a natural development of the Single Market and would benefit all EU Member States. We believe that one area that deserves particular attention is the development of a wellfunctioning market for simple, transparent and real asset-backed securities (ABS). This would allow banks to still originate loans – notably to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – while preserving their balance sheet capacity. In order to achieve a well-functioning ABS market, it is important that the regulatory treatment of securitisation is proportional to the risk of ABS. In this respect, the ECB welcomes efforts to have a differentiated regulatory treatment of simple, transparent ABS built on real assets. Moreover, the provision of public guarantees should be considered to support lending to SMEs, as other countries do, such as the US. A further integration of corporate bond and equities markets is also essential to overcome the present fragmentation in the euro area and to ensure more robust cross-border lending and investment flows. To achieve this, we will have to streamline differences between countries, for instance, in the legal protection of borrowers’ and lenders’ rights as well as in national taxation and insolvency procedures. To sum up, structural policies are more multifaceted than they are often perceived to be in the political debate and can have a very significant impact on investment in a variety of ways. Growth-friendly fiscal policy Yet this is not the only area where governments can make a difference.