The Protection of Financial Consumers:: A Comparative Study between the Republic of Congo and the People?s Republic of China

Consumers are the main levers of the economic development because an economy without consumption is a loss-making economy. For that reason, consumers need an effective and regular protection from governments. However, in some parts of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, governments have not understood yet the need to protect consumers. In most of these countries, there is a lack of consumer protection laws, which gives traders accesses to abuse on consumers. This is the case of the Republic of Congo, where financial consumers are defenseless, they are victims of bad practices from financial institutions. To solve this issue, we have oriented our research towards a comparative study with the People’s Republic of China. This country, which has a rich experience on the protection of consumers, has made great efforts on the protection of financial consumers in recent years. By learning from China, we propose the set-up of a banking commission in Congo under the model of the CBRC to strengthen the protection of financial consumers from a permanent organ of control of financial institutions.