Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2010
Spanish banking has been considered as an industry ruled by oligopolistic conducts. It has been even dealt as a cartel, which has been able to keep along xx century with the support of the State. This paper checks this interpretation with the aid of a set of indexes of the degree of competitori in a market: an annual series of economic concentration and another one of intra-industrial turnover, as well as some proxi figures of the height of the barriers to entry. Doubts about the thesis of the banking cartelization are yielded by our results. To be precise, the competitive nature of the Spanish banking industry is defended, at least for the time before the civil war, and it is questioned that big banks emerged unharmed from the statu quo declared by Franco's goverments.
La banca española se ha considerado tradicionalmente como una industria sujeta a comportamientos oligopolistas. Incluso se le ha llegado a tratar como un cartel, que se ha mantenido a lo largo del siglo xx con el apoyo del Estado. En este artículo se revisa esta interpretación con la ayuda de un conjunto de indicadores del grado de competencia en un mercado: una serie anual de concentración económica y otra de movilidad intra-industrial, así como algunas cifras estimativas de la altura de las barreras de entrada. Los resultados arrojan dudas sobre la tesis de la cartelización de la banca. En concreto, se defiende el carácter básicamente competitivo de la industria bancaria antes de la guerra civil y se pone en duda que la gran banca saliera incólume del statu quo del franquismo.