From 1996 to 2005, publishing of financial stability reports (FSRs) became a rapidly growing “industry,” with the number of central banks issuing such reports increasing worldwide from 1 to about 50. Since 2005, this number has grown somewhat less rapidly, although it has kept increasing and has now reached about 80. For instance, India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, started publishing FSRs in 2010, and the United States, which stayed out of the FSR publishing trend for many years, started publishing an FSR in 2011 (Cihak et al. 2012).

When preparing this paper, international financial institutions, particularly the World Bank (which has facilitated the preparation of a number of strategies in developing countries in partnership with the FIRST Trust Fund), became our primary source of data. Thereafter, the websites and official documents of ministries of finance, central banks, or financial sector supervisors were used as sources for data collection, because these institutions are typically the custodians of national financial sector policy. Only 29 out of the 78 countries in our sample have their financial sector strategies formulated in a single document that aims to address both financial development and financial stability objectives, in contrast to financial inclusion strategies (see section 3 for more details). To accurately assess some of the questions on systemic risk, we used financial sector stability reports. These documents provided more detailed information on the country’s views and approaches to systemic risk management in the financial sector. Yet using these reports was not without challenge. For one thing, not all countries that had a financial sector strategy produced a financial stability report and vice versa. Therefore, comparison across the entire pool of countries for certain topics was not always easy; nonetheless, it was always informative.

Overall, we have strived to “stratify” the countries included in our sample across all geographic regions, levels of development, and different structures of the national financial system and experience of financial crises, among other criteria. For the geographic regions and income level, we have followed the World Bank classification and complemented the developing countries with a proportional sample of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) outside World Bank regions, generally high-income OECD countries. Taking all limitations of our sampling strategy into account, we find the sample in general representative for the purpose of our preliminary study, especially because this is the first such study to have been conducted.

# **_2.1. Establishing financial sector development objectives_**

In reviewing the objectives set forth in financial sector strategies (see table 1), we focus on their _specificity_ and _measurability,_ not on their achievability or realism. We ask whether a given financial sector strategy has clear (specificity) and well-quantified objectives (measurability). This paper does not discuss the _achievability_ or _realism_ of the strategic objectives set forth in the strategies. Such a determination requires a more comprehensive assessment of resources, knowledge, and degree of consensus around the objectives held by key stakeholders in the system for each country. Instead, we are content to assess whether, at a minimum, the strategy includes an adequate specification of tools to achieve the objectives.

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