Despite substantial economic convergence across Central and Eastern Europe over the past three decades, financial intermediation has remained persistently uneven, with Romania representing one of the most pronounced cases of this divergence. Existing research explains these differences primarily through banking-sector characteristics and other supply-side determinants. This paper argues that such explanations are incomplete because they overlook the conditions under which economies generate bankable demand.
Building on comparative evidence from the European Union, the Euro Area and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, with Romania serving as the principal analytical case, the paper develops an integrated conceptual framework that explains how bankable demand emerges from the interaction between two complementary groups of determinants. The first comprises productive and economic factors, including productivity, capitalisation, financial performance and transparency. The second encompasses institutional, behavioural and socio-political factors, arguing that institutional trust, regulatory predictability and the influence of populist rhetoric shape incentives for formal economic participation and, ultimately, the formation of bankable demand. The analysis suggests that financial intermediation depends not only on banks' capacity to supply credit but also on an economy's capacity to generate firms and households that are both able and willing to participate in sustainable formal finance. Within this framework, populist rhetoric is interpreted not primarily as a political phenomenon, but as an institutional and behavioural mechanism capable of weakening trust, increasing regulatory uncertainty and reducing incentives for formalisation, thereby constraining the formation of bankable demand. By positioning bankable demand as the missing analytical link between economic convergence and financial deepening, the paper offers a complementary explanation for the persistence of shallow financial intermediation in transition economies and broadens the analytical perspective on financial development beyond conventional supply-side approaches.

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The state of socio-economic phenomena is usually reflected by a large number of indicators of various importance. In order to quantitatively assess the state of such phenomena, it is necessary to know both the values of the indicators and the weights. When there are many indicators, adequate determination of weights becomes complicated, since experts can no longer mentally weigh the mutual relations of importance of all indicators. The solution of the problem is facilitated by determining the weights in two stages. In the first, the importance ranks of the indicators are obtained, and in the second, based on these ranks, the weights. Both the importance ranks and the weights are determined by experts, therefore it is necessary to check the consistency of their opinions. Today, methods have been developed to determine the consistency of expert assessment of indicator weights, and there is almost no talk about checking the consistency of expert assessment of importance ranks. Methods for determining the consistency of expert assessment of indicator weights are not suitable here, since the expert determines the weights quantitatively, i.e. in numbers, and the importance – qualitatively - indicates which of the two indicators is more important. The proposed methodology, named DeA (definition of agreement), is based on the ratio of the difference in the sums of indicators estimated with identical estimates to the total number of estimates. The compatibility criterion obtained in this way shows the minimum number of identical estimates that must be present in order for the experts' opinions to be consistent. Read more