Purpose – The issue of which financial initial conditions are necessary to materialize the benefits of financial globalization remains open to debate in the literature. In this paper, we try to put some empirical structure on the concept of financial threshold conditions in order to give...

Purpose – The issue of which financial initial conditions are necessary to materialize the benefits of financial globalization remains open to debate in the literature. In this paper, we try to put some empirical structure on the concept of financial threshold conditions in order to give...

The paper verifies the Azzimonti et al. (2014) conclusions on a sample of 53 African countries for the period 1996-2008. Authors of the underlying study have established theoretical underpinnings for a negative nexus between rising public debt and inequality in OECD nations. We assess the...

With the spectre of the Euro crisis hunting embryonic monetary unions, we use a dynamic model of a small open economy to analyze REERs imbalances and examine whether the movements in the aggregate real exchange rates are consistent with the underlying macroeconomic fundamentals in the proposed...

We assess the behavior of real effective exchange rates (REERs) of members of the CEMAC zone with respect to their long-term equilibrium paths. A reduced form of the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate (FEER) model is estimated and associated misalignments are derived for the period 1980 to...

The policy debate has been shifting from the finance-growth nexus to the finance-inequality relationship. In the transition from Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there has been an urgent policy challenge of putting some structure on recent advances in...

Hitherto financial drivers of human development have been unexplored by the UNDP. This paper assesses determinants of human development from financial dynamics of depth, efficiency, size and activity on data from 38 developing countries. While the importance of financial activity, size and depth...

The dominance of English common-law countries in prospects for financial development in the legal-origins debate has been debunked by recent findings. Using exchange rate regimes and economic/monetary integration oriented hypotheses, this paper proposes an “inflation uncertainty theory” in...

In the first empirical study on how financial reforms have been instrumental in mitigating inequality through financial sector competition, we contribute at the same time to the macroeconomic literature on measuring financial development and respond to the growing field of economic development...

This paper integrates a previously missing wealth-effect component in the openness-finance debate. From a panel of 29 low and middle income African countries with data spanning from 1987 to 2008, we provide evidence that openness (trade and financial) triggers less bank efficiency in low income...