Does financial intermediation matter for macroeconomic performance?

This paper investigates whether financial intermediary development influences macroeconomic technical efficiency on a sample of 47 countries, both developed and developing, over 1980–1995. We do so by applying Battese and Coelli (1995)'s method at the aggregate level. It is found that financial intermediary development, except financial depth, is on average associated with more efficiency. However we find strong evidence that this relationship is conditional on the level of economic development. The lower the economic development the weaker is the impact of financial development on efficiency. That impact can even become negative in the poorest countries.     

REMITTANCES AND FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT: SUBSTITUTES OR COMPLEMENTS IN ECONOMIC GROWTH?

Recent studies indicate that the effect of migrants’ remittances on the economic growth of receiving countries depends negatively on the level of development of the domestic financial sector. In this paper, we introduce a new indicator of financial development to measure the efficiency of the domestic banking system, and find the existence of complementarity between remittances and bank efficiency in economic growth, such that remittances promote growth only in countries whose banks function well. This result is robust to controls for other traditional measures of financial depth and institutional quality indicators.     

金融发展与经济增长——基于1952-2007年中国数据的再检验

本文分别以金融抑制论和金融结构论为指导,根据中国的实际情况,建立数学模型,进行多元回归分析,并利用VAR因果关系检验和方差分解探索中国金融发展与经济增长之间的关系.结论表明:(1)无论是金融抑制论还是金融结构论,金融发展与经济增长之间存在显著的正相关;(2)对于模型1来说,金融发展与经济增长存在单向因果关系,属于需求追随型;而模型2并没有显示金融发展与经济增长存在明显的因果关系,以银行为主导的金融结构通过内在传导机制对经济增长产生影响;(3)从金融发展对经济波动解释的力度来看,金融抑制论对解释金融发展与经济增长之间的关系比较弱,而金融结构论对经济增长的解释力要强.因此,在强调市场对金融资源优化配置的同时,更加关注以银行业为主导的金融机构改革,理顺金融发展与经济增长内在机制,以实现金融发展与经济增长相互促进、共同发展的目标.     

Financial flows and economic growth in developing countries

This paper assesses the impact of financial flows and their composition on the real exchange rate and on economic growth for a sample of low- and middle-income countries over the period of 1980–2012. Financial flows can directly support economic growth by relaxing constraints on domestic resources, but can also indirectly weaken growth through appreciation of the real exchange rate. We use the generalized method of moments (GMM) for dynamic panel. Results show that net financial flows affect economic growth both directly and indirectly: (i) a one percent increase in total financial flows appreciates the real exchange rate by 0.5 percent; (ii) the real exchange rate appreciation effect of remittances is twice the effect of aid and ten times greater than the effect of Foreign Direct Investments; (iii) financial flows stimulate economic growth regardless of the development level. An increase of $10 per capita financial flows leads to a gain of 0.08 points of annual growth. This gain amounts to 0.15 when we control for the negative impact of the real exchange rate. Instability of market-oriented flows, such as FDI and portfolio investments, exacerbates instability of the economic growth rate.     

Financial Development and Economic Growth Nexus: A Revisionist Approach

In this piece, we highlight some of the salient issues and controversies surrounding the relationship between financial development and economic growth, from both the theoretical and the empirical fronts. We first discuss the controversies on the role of financial development in economic growth; and we then proceed to review the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth. We conclude that the relationship between financial development and economic growth is highly complex, and is dependent on a number of factors. Hence, the argument that financial development always leads to economic growth should be taken with extreme caution.     

Non‐linear finance–growth nexus

This paper revisits the question of whether the finance–growth nexus varies with the stages of economic development. Using a novel threshold regression with the instrumental variables approach proposed by Caner and Hansen (2004) to the dataset used in Levine et al. (2000) we detect overwhelming evidence in support of a positive linkage between financial development and economic growth, and this positive effect is larger in the low‐income countries than in the high‐income ones. The data also reveal that financial development tends to have stronger impacts on capital accumulation and productivity growth in the low‐income countries than in the high‐income ones. The findings are robust to alternative financial development measures and conditioning information sets.     

金融发展、资本积累与内生增长:一个评述

本文以资本外溢AK内生增长模型为基础,对金融发展、资本积累与经济增长关系的理论研究和经验分析作了一个文献综述.理论研究表明:金融发展通过提高储蓄转化为资本比率、改善投资配置效率和改变储蓄率等途径促进资本积累和经济增长;金融发展与经济增长之间呈互相促进、互为因果的双向关系,并形成金融发达、经济高增长和金融欠发达、经济低增长的双重均衡.经验分析显示,金融发展与经济增长之间呈显著正相关关系,这证实了金融发展与内生增长理论的预测.     

Finance–Growth Nexus and the P‐bias: Evidence from OECD Countries

Recent studies provide new empirical evidence confirming that financial development is linked to economic growth in OECD countries. Using new dynamic panel regression techniques, these appraisals indicate that within the group of high‐income countries stock market size as a measure of financial advancement contributes significantly to overall economic activity. Applying the same advanced techniques, this paper questions this conclusion by showing that the findings of these studies seem to be not only not robust with respect to adding new observations but also likely to be plagued by a severe price bias which belittles the information content of the used financial indicator (stock market capitalization). We provide evidence that anticipative price effects (i.e. expectations of future growth, reflected in current stock prices) may be driving the statistical relationship between stock market activities and economic growth in high‐income countries to a much larger extent than recent analyses of the finance– growth link in OECD countries suggest .     

The Financial Sector and Economic Growth*

The Mankiw–Romer–Weil (1992) augmented Solow–Swan ( Solow 1956 ; Swan 1956 ) model is extended to incorporate the financial sector in this study. Distinguishing between financial capital, physical capital and human capital, the research attempts to identify, in particular, the effects of financial capital on economic growth. The effects of financial sector efficiency on economic growth are also examined. The financial sector augmented model is tested on a cross‐section of 35 economies. Strong support is found for the model.     

Financial development and economic growth nexus: A rejoinder to Tsionas

Tsionas has offered a more revisionist approach to the empirics of the nexus between financial development and economic growth following our paper entitled ‘Financial development and economic growth nexus: A revisionist approach’. In the current note, we engage Tsionas’ approach in tandem with our original finance–growth nexus review. We concur with Tsionas’ approach and reiterate that the debate on the relationship between financial development and economic growth remains a complex terrain both on the theoretical and empirical fronts.     

Opening a stock exchange

A large body of theoretical and empirical literature has established a positive relationship between levels of stock market development and economic growth. However, previous empirical work has been based on samples of approximately 40 countries with the most highly developed financial systems. Since 1950, over 70 countries have opened their first national stock exchanges. Can such exchanges increase economic growth? I present a data set of my construction that describes the exchange openings that occurred between 1960 and 1998, and find that these exchanges have generated increases in growth during their first 5 years of existence, although the longer-term results are ambiguous.     

分税制改革、地方政府干预和金融加速器效应——基于中部地区1995～2008年面板数据的实证分析

运用双向固定效应模型,实证分析了中部地区地方政府对金融发展的干预对金融加速经济发展的效应的影响。研究表明,在经济转型期,中部地区金融业的低水平稳态发展成为阻碍地区经济增长的不利因素。而地方政府因发展经济的强烈动机,适当干预金融发展能弥补地方金融自身发展的不足,促进金融发展推动地区的经济增长。     

Financial Development and Economic Growth: The Tunisian Experience

The aim of this paper is to investigate empirically the question of whether financial development leads to economic growth in a small, developing country like Tunisia. The paper focuses on the causal link between finance and economic growth in order to discriminate between several alternative theoretical hypotheses. The results suggest the existence of a stable long-run relationship between the development of the financial sector and the evolution of per capita real output that is consistent with the view that financial development can be an engine of growth in this country.     

Financial structure and economic growth

Recent empirical work on financial structure and economic growth analyzes multi-country dataset in panel and/or cross-section frameworks and concludes that financial structure is irrelevant. We highlight their shortcomings and re-examine this issue utilizing a time series and a Dynamic Heterogeneous Panel methods. Our sample consists of fourteen countries. Tests reveal that cross-country data cannot be pooled. Financial structure significantly explains output levels in most countries. The results are rigorously scrutinized through bootstrap exercises and they are robust to extensive sensitivity tests. We also test for several hypotheses about the prospective role of financial structure and financial development on economic growth.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Aid on Growth

The fact that so many countries register low per capita income after receiving enormous amounts of foreign aid questions its effectiveness as a tool for economic growth and consequently as an instrument of poverty alleviation. The impact of foreign aid on economic growth is ultimately an empirical question and one that will be addressed in this paper. The paper uses the most recent data and incorporates most of the salient features of the new growth literature to test the effect of aid on economic growth. Three important conclusions emerged from the empirical analysis of the paper. First, it shows that the effect of aid on growth is nonlinear. The nonlinearity of the relationship indicates a threshold for foreign aid beyond which more aid is detrimental to economic growth. Second, the empirical results of this paper support Burnside and Dollars findings that a good policy environment is important for aid to work effectively. Aid effectiveness can only be sustained in an environment of good economic policy. Finally, using etholinguistic fractionalization as an instrument, the empirical results of the paper indicate that the relationship between AID/GDP and economic growth is sequential. More and more aid leads to lower economic growth.The authors would like to thank W. Mark Crain, G. Chris Rodrigo, Willem Thorbecke, an anonymous referee, and the participants of the 57th International Atlantic Economic Conference held in Lisbon, March 10–14, 2004. This paper is presented to the conference under a different title. Professor Ali would also like to thank the Research Council of Niagara University for their financial help.     

Financial Development and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from Six MENA Countries

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth for six Middle Eastern and North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia), within a quadvariate vector autoregressive framework. We employ four different measures of financial development and apply the augmented vector autoregression vector (VAR) methodology of Toda and Yamamoto to test for Granger causality. Our empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that finance leads to growth in five out of the six countries. Only in Israel could weak support be found for causality running from economic growth to financial development but no causality in the other direction. These findings suggest the need to accelerate the financial reforms that have been launched since the mid 1980s and to improve the efficiency of these countries’ financial systems to stimulate saving/investment and, consequently, long‐term economic growth.     

Are financial development and corruption control substitutes in promoting growth?

While financial development and corruption control have been studied extensively, their interaction has not. We develop a simple model in which low corruption and financial development both facilitate the undertaking of productive projects, but act as substitutes in doing so. The substitutability arises because corruption raises the need for liquidity and thus makes financial improvements more potent; conversely, financial underdevelopment makes corruption more onerous and thus raises the gains from reducing it. We test this substitutability by predicting growth, of countries and industries, using measures of financial development, lack of corruption, and a key interaction term. Both approaches point to positive effects from improving either factor, as well as to a substitutability between them. The growth gain associated with moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile in one factor is 0.63–1.68 percentage points higher if the second factor is at the 25th percentile rather than the 75th. The results show robustness to different measures of corruption and financial development and do not appear to be driven by outliers, omitted variables, or other theories of growth and convergence.     

Financial depth,internet penetration rates and economic growth: country-panel evidence

The article investigates causal relationships between internet penetration rates, financial depth and per capita economic growth in the Next-11 countries. Using panel vector autoregressive (VAR) approaches, our empirical results show that these variables are cointegrated. Moreover, we find bidirectional causality between internet penetration rates and economic growth, and between financial depth and economic growth in the short run.     

农村金融发展对农村经济增长的作用机理——基于内生增长理论的实证研究

基于内生增长理论的农村金融发展作用于农村经济增长的主要机理是农村金融发展通过储蓄效应、投资效应和资源配置效应推动物质资本积累、人力资本积累和技术进步,以促进农村经济增长。实证研究表明,农村金融发展通过规模促进农村经济增长的渠道是有效的;农村金融发展通过提高效率促进农村经济增长的渠道是无效的,也即当前农村金融发展效率不能促进农村经济增长。     

Inflation and the finance–growth nexus

This paper re-investigates whether there exist inflation thresholds in the finance–growth linkage. By applying the Caner and Hansen's (2004) instrumental-variable threshold regression approach to the dataset of Levine et al. (2000), we find strong evidence of a nonlinear inflation threshold in the relationship, below which financial development exerts a significantly positive effect on economic growth, while, above which, the growth effect of finance appears to be insignificant. Furthermore, we also find a positive and significant relationship between finance and productivity for inflation rates below the threshold level, but no such relationship is detected for inflation rates above the critical level. This result suggests that finance influences growth mainly through the productivity channel.