How Large Are Deposit-Money Bank Assets Relative to GDP? (2021)

Deposit money bank assets to GDP compares the claims held by deposit-taking banks on the domestic real nonfinancial sector with annual GDP. In the World Bank Global Financial Development series GFDD.DI.02, 139 countries and areas have observations dated 2021. Their median is 62.33% of GDP and their unweighted mean is 71.69%. Hong Kong SAR records 268.82%, Macao SAR 241.52%, China 214.23%, and Korea 181.66%.

What the indicator actually measures

The World Bank defines GFDD.DI.02 as claims on the domestic real nonfinancial sector held by deposit money banks, expressed as a share of GDP. The covered counterparties include central, state and local governments, nonfinancial public enterprises, and the private sector. Deposit money banks include commercial banks and other financial institutions that accept transferable deposits such as demand deposits. The underlying raw data come from the IMF International Financial Statistics.

A ratio of 100% does not mean banks made new loans equal to an entire year of GDP. Bank assets and claims are balance-sheet stocks that can remain outstanding for years, while GDP is a flow of production measured over one year. A stock can therefore exceed one year of output without being a statistical contradiction.

This is not the bank-deposits-to-GDP ratio

GFDD.DI.02 should not be confused with GFDD.OI.02, Bank deposits to GDP. The deposits indicator measures demand, time and saving deposits on the liability side of deposit money banks. GFDD.DI.02 instead looks at the asset or claims side: what deposit-taking banks hold against domestic governments, public enterprises and private borrowers. The two ratios can be related through banking intermediation, but they answer different questions and need not have the same value.

It is also broader than a pure private-credit measure because the numerator can include claims on government and nonfinancial public enterprises. A country can therefore have a large GFDD.DI.02 value even when a narrower private-credit ratio is lower.

The 2021 median is 62.33% across 139 observations

Giving every 2021 country or area observation equal weight, the median is 62.33% and the simple mean is 71.69%. The first quartile is 33.69% and the third quartile is 92.66%. The mean sits above the median because several upper-tail observations exceed 200% of GDP. This is an equal-weight descriptive average, not a GDP-weighted global bank-assets ratio.

The largest band is 25% to under 50%, with 36 observations, followed by 34 between 50% and 75%. Thirty-one observations are at least 100% of GDP, or about 22.3% of the same-year set. Crossing 100% is therefore not an automatic error threshold, but it is also not a score of banking quality.

Hong Kong, Macao, China and Qatar exceed 200%

Hong Kong SAR is the highest 2021 observation at 268.82%, followed by Macao SAR at 241.52%, China at 214.23% and Qatar at 208.05%. Korea is fifth at 181.66%. Denmark, Japan, Cambodia, New Zealand and Malaysia round out the ten highest observations, all above 150%.

A high ratio can reflect a bank-centered financial structure or a large stock of claims on domestic borrowers and governments relative to annual output. The indicator by itself cannot identify which balance-sheet components produce a country’s value. It does not show maturity, currency, collateral, credit quality, or whether the assets are concentrated in households, firms or government.

Low ratios are not direct measures of financial exclusion

Sudan is the lowest 2021 observation at 7.87%, followed by Zimbabwe, Haiti, Tajikistan and Libya. Guinea, Nigeria, Cyprus, Comoros and Niger are also below 20%. These figures show a relatively small measured stock of deposit-money-bank claims compared with GDP. They do not directly tell us account ownership, mobile-money use, access to credit, the size of capital markets, or the role of nonbank finance.

East and Southeast Asia show both high levels and sharp contrasts

The 2021 map shows a high-value cluster across several East Asian economies: Hong Kong 268.82%, Macao 241.52%, China 214.23%, Korea 181.66% and Japan 169.62%. Southeast Asia is less uniform. Cambodia is 166.33%, Malaysia 153.02%, Thailand 152.02% and Viet Nam 136.18%, while Indonesia is 43.29% and the Philippines 71.03%.

South Asia also varies widely, from Nepal at 123.61% to India at 72.40%, Bangladesh at 59.20% and Pakistan at 45.33%. Geographic proximity does not imply a common banking-depth ratio because financial systems differ in the role of banks, governments, public enterprises, capital markets and alternative financing channels.

Europe and Africa are internally diverse as well

In Europe, Denmark records 169.88%, Sweden 145.84%, the United Kingdom 136.02%, France 131.07%, Spain 119.65%, Italy 115.45% and Portugal 114.68%. Germany is 95.92%, Belgium 82.98%, while Cyprus is much lower at 16.62%. A continental average would hide these differences.

Africa ranges from Mauritius at 129.17% to South Africa at 74.29%, Seychelles at 65.21%, Kenya at 47.86%, Niger at 18.21% and Nigeria at 16.40%. The map is useful for locating these contrasts, but explaining them requires country-level evidence on bank balance sheets, public-sector claims, private credit and other financial institutions.

Reference years still matter for major economies

The latest-non-missing file contains 181 country and area rows, but their years range from 2008 to 2021. There are 139 observations from 2021, 18 from 2020 and 10 from 2019; the remaining 14 are dated 2008–2018. The United States is dated 2020, Singapore 2020, Saudi Arabia 2017 and Canada 2008.

For that reason, the map, mean, median and high/low rankings in this article use only the 139 observations that share the 2021 reference year. Older latest observations are shown only in the year-labeled comparison table and are not treated as synchronized current rankings.

A higher ratio is not a banking-safety score

A large stock of bank assets relative to GDP can be consistent with deep financial intermediation, but the ratio says nothing about asset quality. Two banking systems with the same ratio can have very different nonperforming-loan levels, capital buffers, liquidity positions, interest-rate exposure, collateral quality and borrower concentration.

A low value should also not automatically be labeled financial underdevelopment. Capital markets, nonbank financial institutions, foreign financing and digital finance may play larger roles outside the deposit-money-bank balance sheet. GFDD.DI.02 is therefore best used as one dimension of financial depth rather than a complete ranking of financial systems.

Source and calculation method

The source is the World Bank Global Financial Development indicator GFDD.DI.02, Deposit money banks’ assets to GDP (%). The World Bank describes the numerator as claims on the domestic real nonfinancial sector by deposit money banks and identifies the IMF International Financial Statistics as the underlying source.

The retained latest-value data contain 181 non-null country or area observations. For a synchronized comparison, all headline statistics were recalculated from the 139 observations dated 2021: median 62.33%, mean 71.69%, first quartile 33.69% and third quartile 92.66%. Missing values were not converted to zero and older observations were not relabeled as 2021.

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