A particularly remarkable feature of financialization since circa 1980 is that it has been a near-global phenomenon in that almost all countries in the world have been involved to a greater or lesser extent and starting from different scale and structures of the financial sector. As with the earlier era of financialization, the present one has occurred alongside and interacting with globalization.

The processes of financialization have been centred on and driven by the western industrialized countries. Most of the empirical analysis and evidence on financialization that is drawn on in other chapters largely relate to the western industrialized countries. In this chapter the coverage moves to other countries, many of which would be labelled “developing and emerging economies”, using the terminology of the IMF.

The broad picture is of substantial financialization in a general sense, albeit with variations, taking different forms and at different speeds (as compared with the advanced industrialized countries). It is also a picture of later starts on financialization and, particularly and for obvious reasons, in the COMECON countries coming after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It is important to not only explore the nature and speed of financialization in the developing and emerging market countries but also to relate the nature of that financialization to the positions of those economies in the global economy and the economic and social power relationships involved.

This chapter has two related aims. The first is to summarize the extent and nature of financialization around the globe and, in doing so, to reinforce that financialization has been a near-global phenomenon and that it has been a variegated process. The second is to consider how financialization proceeds and its effects in countries, which are not at the centre of capitalism but rather on the periphery.

I begin by making some comparisons between the scale of finance in a wide range of countries. The IMF has produced a set of FDIs that now cover nearly four decades. Svirydzenka (2016) sets how the indices are calculated, and these are available for a wide range of countries from 1980 onwards. For both financial institutions and financial markets, the three measures of depth, access and efficiency are taken, which are first combined into an index for financial institutions and financial markets, and then into an overall index for financial development.