Working Tax Credit – Help with the costs of childcare

Data by country reveal that, despite the severity of the recent global financial crisis, bank credit contracted in only a handful of individual economies. When bank credit includes credit to governments in each country, as in Graph A, our estimates indicate that Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg experienced outright contractions in bank credit to non-bank borrowers between Q2 2008 and Q2 2011. In the wake of the crisis, government deficits in many countries have ballooned just as banks sought refuge from a volatile investing environment, a combination that tilted banks’ portfolios towards government securities. If we focus on the growth in credit to non-bank private...