A Farewell to Monetization

Abstract This paper inquires the nature of monetization with the positive transaction costs approach. It is argued that the nature of monetization is marketization. Once a market emerges, its monetization would be practically 100 %. The huge efforts devoted to measure monetization are thus chasing a mission impossible, and the policy implications derived from these measures are possibly misleading. The study of this paper suggests that it could be beneficial to discard the concept of monetization in the study of financial development and illustrates the importance of the systematic inclusion of transaction costs into economic analysis.