Over the past dozen or so years prudential banking regulations have been standardized and accepted widely across countries. This has not only contributed to the increased shared safety of the sector, but also made the competitive environment more uniform worldwide. The norms developed in the process strive to achieve a symmetry between the properly identified and weighted risk and the adequate capital of the banks. The new Basle Banking Supervision Committee regulation project, entitled "New Structure of Capital Adequacy" is also orientated towards that goal. The Committee suggests a new approach in ascribing risk weights to different types of bank assets, classified according to external ratings and evaluations. This approach extends to include receivables from the government and the central bank. The direct consequence of this approach is that country risk is incorporated into the country's own prudential regulations. With such a solution in place, banks - whether operating at a local or international level - will have to apply a common international risk reference map. This entails a fundamental change in the competitive environment: local banks will lose the advantage of being able to ignore country or region risk in their local level decisions. As long as this was possible, banks were able to pursue efficiency by keeping equity levels suppressed.

It is doubtful whether the proposed regulations, imposing higher risk weights on Treasury or NBP receivables will significantly contribute to the safety of the Polish banking sector. On the other hand, it will certainly hurt the sector's competitive ability - as well as its expansion capacity based on financial leverage. The recommendations of "New Structure of Capital Adequacy" should be applied selectively and assessed against the backdrop of the general competitive ability of the Polish banking sector.