¹¹As a caveat, it is important to acknowledge that CEA might to some degree be influenced by developments from the demand rather than the supply side of the credit market. But whatever its flaws in this regard, indexes of this sort seem to be gaining increasing acceptance as the best available measures of credit supply (as distinguished from credit demand).
The CEA index correlates strongly with measures financial reforms of Abiad, Detragiache, and Tressel (2010), and measures of banking deregulation of Demyanyk, Ostergaard, and Sørensen (2007) (see panel A of their Figure 1, p. 2786 and Appendix 1).