coIn 1950, there were 49 countries with stock exchanges, 24 were in Europe and 14 in former British colonies such as the United States, Canada and Australia. Their usefulness was seen as limited to only the wealthier countries in which they resided. Developing countries had low levels of savings and limited means to attract foreign capital; stock markets played an insignificant role in their economic growth before the 1980s. Funding for economic capital came primarily from foreign aid, state-to-state from advanced industrial countries to developing economies during the 50’s and 60’s.
During the 1970s there was an increase in private bank long-term lending to foreign states that nearly equalled state aid, and as Keynesian ideas came into disrepute due to stagflation. In 1982 when Mexico suspended its external debt service, it marked the beginning of the debt crisis throughout the developing world; banks severely limited lending to developing nations.
The IMF and the World Bank supported stock market development not solely on the grounds of ideology but rather that the stock market is a natural outgrowth of a developing financial sector as long-term economic growth proceeds and also as a criticism of early development efforts through Development Finance Institutes (DFI) . These DFI’s had difficulties during the 1970s economic crisis of the third world. Singh cites the World Development Report of 1989 that the poor performance of these DFI’s was due to the “inefficiencies of these DFIs and the banked-based interventionist financial systems." The report argued that a restructuring of these systems to make them “voluntary, fiscally neutral and to being them as far as practicable under private ownership.” (Singh, 2, 1993) A new term was coined “emerging markets” for third world countries which would help legitimize stock markets as a method of economic development.