This paper assesses how legal origin influences financial development through regulation quality and the rule of law. It employs all the dimensions identified by the Financial Development and Structure Database of the World Bank. The law channels are instrumented with legal origins to account...

This paper proposes and empirically validates four theories of why legal origin influences growth and welfare through finance. It is a natural extension of "Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?" by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2003). We find only partial support...

This paper examines the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the period 1985-2009. The empirical evidence is based on an endoeneity-robust Generalised Method of Moments. Results show...

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...

The overarching question tackled in this paper is: to what degree has financial development contributed to providing opportunities of human development for those on low-incomes and by what information technology mechanisms? We systematically review about 180 recently published papers to provide...

The overarching question tackled in this paper is: to what degree has financial development contributed to providing opportunities of human development for those on low-incomes and by what information technology mechanisms? We survey about 180 recently published papers to provide recent...

We test the hypotheses that fundamental characteristics in regional proximity, landlockedness, religious-domination, legal origin, and income levels affect cross-country differences in the persistence in political terror and political instability in 163 countries for the period 2010 to 2015. The...

This study examines how increasing ICT penetration in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can contribute towards environmental sustainability by decreasing CO2 emissions. The empirical evidence is based the Generalised Method of Moments and forty-four countries for the period 2000-2012. ICT is measured...

Given that challenges facing sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries on the issue of socioeconomic development have been identified as critical to strengthening the inherent link between governance and socioeconomic conditions, this study examines the interconnections between governance and SSA...

This paper forwards the view that some aspects of African culture enhance economic development on the continent while other aspects tend to constrain development. By drawing on the extant literature on culture and development, the paper discusses the manner in which economic activities are...