Many Caribbean financial systems are relatively well developed for their size but benefits are concentrated in a small part of the population. In several large countries, the financial development levels are below what is warranted by that country's own macroeconomic fundamentals. SMEs, in...

This paper analyzes the links between financial and trade openness and financial development in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. It is based on a panel dataset using methods that tackle slope heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence and non-stationarity, important econometric problems that...

This study aims to identify policies that influence the development of financial institutions as measured across three dimensions: Dept.h, efficiency, and stability. Applying the concept of the financial possibility frontier, developed by Beck & Feyen (2013) and formalized by Barajas et al...

This paper examines how financial development affects the sources of growth-productivity and investment-using a sample of 145 countries for the period 1960-2011. We employ a range of econometric approaches, focusing on the CCA and MENA countries. The analysis looks beyond financial depth to...

This paper assesses the impact of the steadily growing remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Though the region receives only a small portion of the total recorded remittances to developing countries, and the volume of aid flows to SSA swamps remittances, this paper finds that...

This paper studies the apparent contradictions between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit...

International comparisons reveal that-even controlling for a host of explanatory factors-credit depth is exceptionally low in Mexico. Using panel data methods linking credit growth and fundamentals, this paper estimates a long-term gap between actual and expected credit of about 40 percent of...

In recent years, Brazil has achieved substantial progress in capital market development by building a diversified investor base and expanding the menu of available financial instruments. In this context, we evaluated the invested Brazilian market portfolio for a period spanning 2005-15. This is...