The internationalization of Australian banks

Abstract

Since the 19th century, Australian banking has seen high inward and some outward flows of FDI. However, from the 1980s, Australian banks greatly expanded the scale of their FDI, their geographic scope and the range of products that they offered. This recent outward flow of FDI was the result of a complex and inter-related set of factors, including a push from a small and crowded Australian market and the pull of foreign wholesale and retail markets, that liberalization of trade and investment in financial services had made accessible. A combination of what Rugman (Inside the Multinationals: The Economics of Internal Markets, 1981, Croom Helm, London and Columbia University Press, New York) c..