This publication provides information on financial statements and balance sheets of banks in all OECD Member countries. The coverage of banks in this volume is not the same in each country, though the objective is to include all institutions which conduct ordinary banking business, namely institutions which primarily take deposits from the public at large and provide finance for a wide range of purposes. Some supplementary structural information, including the number of reporting banks, their branches and staff, regarding the whole financial sector as well as brief methodological information by country are also included. Moreover, a number of ratios, based on various items and specific aggregates of the financial statements, are supplied to facilitate the analysis of trends in bank profitability of OECD countries. The book Bank Profitability – Methodological Country Notes complements the series included in the present publication.

The present volume provides statistics updating the earlier editions of Bank Profitability – Financial Statements of Banks. Statistics are based on financial statements of banks in each Member country and are presented in the standard OECD framework. Although the objective is to include all institutions which conduct ordinary banking business, namely institutions which primarily take deposits from the public and provide finance for a wide range of purposes, the institutional coverage of banks in the statistics published in the present volume is not the same in each country. Moreover, differences across the countries in the presentation of banks data are due to dissimilar structures of their financial system as well as various accounting rules and practises.