The aim of this paper is to analyse the current situation in a number of selected financial institutions within Member States, and to outline some practical ways in which the performance of cross-border credit transfers might be improved. In particular it examines:
• The actual costs of cross-border payments, both for the banks and for their customers;
• how these costs arise; and
• how they are divided between the different operational phases of transactions.
Much of the research focuses on how payment instructions are processed, and the costs
created by the lack of interoperability between national payment systems. It concludes by
suggesting how these inefficiencies might possibly be reduced and if they can be reduced.

Summary:
After widespread expectations that the world economy was eventually settling into a growth path of some 3 per cent per annum, which would eventually make it possible to reduce unemployment in industrial countries and poverty in developing countries, global growth took a sharp dive in 1998. Particularly dramatic has been the deterioration in global economic conditions in the latter half of 1998 as a consequence of deepening recession in the East Asian economies and in Japan. A resurgence

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