Nascent stock exchanges — tales of success and failure

Public equity markets are seen as a critical component of a developed financial system, with such markets going back to the 18^th and 19^th century in many advanced economies.  There have been therefore intensive efforts of donors and local government to establish such markets across the developing world, in the 1980s across Sub-Saharan Africa and in the 1990s across many transition economies.  These efforts, however, have been met with mixed success, illustrated by the statement by a local market practitioner that “an entire year’s worth of trading in the frontier African stock markets is done before lunch on the New York Stock Exchange.”1 On the other extreme are markets such as China, which have developed rapidly over the past two decades, with many listed companies, high trade volume and a broad investor basis.  What explains why some countries have well-developed public equity markets while others have shallow and illiquid markets?