A Kinked Pipe: Uruguay’s Banking Intermediation Puzzle

Financial development is central to growth because it mobilizes savings, allocates capital, and supports investment and productivity. This paper asks why Uruguay combines an ample deposit base with unusually low private credit, and whether the constraint lies in deposit mobilization or in transforming those deposits into lending. Using cross-country data for 154 countries over 20112023, we estimate the macroeconomic, volatility, institutional, and banking-structure determinants of the deposits-to-GDP, credit-to-GDP, and credit-to-deposits ratios. We find that Uruguay's credit-to-GDP gap is largely explained by historical macroeconomic instability, banking crises, institutional factors, and banking-sector characteristics, whereas deposits are larger than predicted by the model, and the credit-to-deposits ratio remains mostly unexplained. The results imply that policy should focus less on expanding deposits than on deepening local-currency credit markets, reducing dollarization and intermediation costs, and improving the conditions under which savings are transformed into productive credit.