A hazai takarékszövetkezeti szektor szerepe a vidék finanszírozásában
The Role of Home Co-operative Bank Sector in Financing Rural Areas

Summary/Abstract: Hungarian co-operative banks are living their renaissance. Their loan books did not only escape from Swissfranc denominated lending but proved to be profitable despite the huge losses in the Hungarian banking sector as a whole. The paper examines the geographical directions of money transfers, which generate both the agglomeration and the dispersing effects in co-operative banking and describes the main factors of polarization, which characterized the evolution of the Hungarian banking sector in the last two decades. It investigates the impact of factors that influence the loan/deposit ratio and the spatial structure of branch network of co-operative banks. Preliminary spatial implications of their activities can be identified. The main question is whether the cooperative banks due to their stronger local embededness are able to perform the local and rural banking functions. Whereas, our publicly available balance sheet data show that their lending activities are much less active on local markets than on inter-bank market, which is a clear sign of pulling out local resources from the countryside.

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