BANK REGULATION AND SUPERVISION PRACTICES IN SOUTH ASIA

Bank Regulation and Supervision Practices in South Asia presents a comprehensive analysis of bank regulation and supervision practices in South Asia, offering in-depth country-specific and cross-country insights into regulatory frameworks and their harmonization within the region. Focusing on six South Asian countries — Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Maldives, and Sri Lanka — the book systematically evaluates progression of key regulatory and supervisory practices to assess their effectiveness in promoting financial stability, resilience, and inclusive growth. It employs a co-created, comparative approach based on a common analytical framework, supported by survey-based data from the World Bank's Bank Regulation and Supervision Surveys (BRSS) and the latest ADBI-conducted survey during 2018–2024. The country studies covered in the book provide discussion on a wide range of core and emerging regulatory frameworks, including deposit insurance, capital adequacy, liquidity regulations, FinTech-enabling and digital payments regulations, consumer protection, and environmental and social compliance norms. A unique analytical framework is adopted for assessment of macro-financial diagnostics, financial policy evaluations and identifying regulatory gaps in South Asia. Further, it presents the econometric assessment of the impact of regulatory reforms on bank performance in South Asia. The book fills an important knowledge gap by offering both theoretical and practical insights, combining expert analysis with first-hand perspectives from central bank officials. It serves as a useful policy-relevant reference for regulators, researchers, and development partners, delivering actionable recommendations to strengthen regulatory norms and address emerging risks emanating from digitalization and climate change in the region.

Dr Rachita Gulati is a Research Fellow/Economist at the Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo, Japan. She is also an Associate Professor (Economics) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, Uttarakhand. She received the Subir Chowdhury Visiting Fellowship 2017–2018 from the India Observatory, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, London, United Kingdom. With over 15 years of academic and research experience, she specializes in banking and financial institutions, regulations and financial stability, corporate governance, inclusive banking, bank digitalization, applied econometrics, and efficiency and productivity analysis. She has led several policy-oriented research projects in collaboration with central banks and prominent think tanks across South, Southeast, and East Asia.

She has published several articles in top-ranked journals, and contributed to studies funded by the Reserve Bank of India, the State Finance Commission of Haryana, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). She is also a member of several national and international associations.

Dr Tetsushi Sonobe is Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). Previously, Dr. Sonobe served as the Dean and CEO of the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), the Tokyo-based think tank of the Asian Development Bank from 2020-2025. Dean Sonobe obtained his PhD in economics from Yale University and BA in economics from the University of Tokyo. His research interests are centered on the roles of economic agglomeration, human and social capital, management practices, and market competition in economic development, climate action, and global governance. Before joining ADBI in April 2020, Dean Sonobe served as a Vice President of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), a public policy school in Tokyo, and taught economics for thirty years at Tokyo Metropolitan University and GRIPS. In 2023, he served as the chair of Think7, the think tank engagement group of G7 Japan. He is a recipient of the Nikkei Book Publication Prize and the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize, and the vice president of the Japanese Association for Development Economics (JADE).

Dr Dil Rahut is Vice-Chair of Research and Senior Fellow at Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI). His research focuses on development microeconomics, agricultural economics, and environmental and natural resource economics. He is currently implementing experiments and field research in agriculture, natural resources, and climate in Asia. Prior to joining ADBI, he was a senior global program manager for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre's (CIMMYT) socioeconomics and sustainable intensification programs and served as chair of the staffs' committee at CIMMYT. He also previously worked for the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan's Research and Statistics Department and served as a research fellow at the WorldFish Centre; senior fellow and Japan chair at the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations; chief of research, planning, and monitoring and Visa/Mastercard director at the Bank of Bhutan Ltd; and assistant professor of development economics at South Asian University. He has over 200 publications in Scopus indexed journals and has guest-edited several special journal issues. He also serves as an editorial board member of the Asian Development Review and lectures. He lectures at the University of Tokyo and Hitotsubashi University in Japan on recent issues in development economics.

Prof. Sunil Kumar holds a position of Professor in Economics at the Faculty of Economics at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi, India. With over 29 years of teaching experience, he has a strong background in subjects related to quantitative methods, banking and financial institutions, and applied econometrics. His research interests revolve around efficiency measurement in banking and financial institutions using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis approaches. He has published numerous scholarly articles in prestigious national and international journals. He has authored two books exploring efficiency and productivity in the manufacturing and banking sectors of the Indian economy. The Indian Society of Regional Science, the Indian Economic Association, and The Econometric Society are among his professional affiliations. He recently completed a research project with the Reserve Bank of India on "Governance, Efficiency and Soundness of Indian Banks".