May 21 (SeeNews) - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said on Thursday that a new report commissioned by the lender calls for substantial reforms of debt capital markets in eight countries in Central and Southeast Europe.
The report examines the markets in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and the Slovak Republic through standardised models judging the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of bond issuances, the EBRD said in a statement.
Among the researched markets, Romania ranked first in terms of cost-effectiveness, while Bulgaria performed best in terms of issuance efficiency.
The report makes several suggestions for improving the local debt markets, including the introduction of caps on scalable fees, tax incentives for investing in debt securities, and prospectus templates which can be used as benchmarks.
The report also recommends limiting the use of expensive trading systems and calls on government debt management offices or central banks to consider providing more consistency and notice to the market to facilitate greater participation from retail investors.
UK consultancy InvestorConnected wrote the report based on 2018 data.