The paper documents the major trends in financial development in Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1990s. The paper compares trends in Latin America and the Caribbean with those in Asia, Eastern Europe, and advanced countries and compares countries within Latin America and the...

With extensive country and firm-level data sets, this paper first documents that the financial sectors of most Sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. The paper also finds that population density appears to be considerably...

This paper combines firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure, and uses two estimation approaches. It finds that in low-income countries, labor growth is swifter in countries with a higher level of private credit/gross domestic product; the positive...

This paper examines the evolving importance of banks and securities markets during the process of economic development. As economies develop, they increase their demand for the services provided by securities markets relative to those provided by banks, such that securities markets become...

Private savings play a pivotal role in financing development and sustaining growth. Recently, there have been many theoretical developments that underpin key determinants of savings behavior, many of which merit empirical investigation. Understanding the dynamics of the determinants of savings...

Across the world, supply for financial services rarely matches the demand, given multiple market frictions. This paper discusses the concept of the financial possibilities frontier as a constrained optimum to categorize different problems of shallow financial markets or unsustainable expansion....

This paper investigates the link between export survival of agri-food products and financial development. It tests the hypothesis that financial development differentially affects the survival of exports across products based on their need of external finance. The authors test whether exports of...

The paper provides an assessment of the state of financial inclusion in the MENA region, and identifies constraints, opportunities, and priorities for significantly improving access to finance. Practical recommendations for improving financial inclusion are outlined. Firstly, governments could...

Recent empirical evidence highlights that access to basic financial services can make a substantial positive difference in improving poor people's lives. Accordingly, financial sector reforms that promote financial inclusion are increasingly at the core of policymakers? agendas. The Consultative...

This paper shows how badly a market economy may respond to a positive productivity shock in an environment with asymmetric information about project quality: some, all, or even more than all the benefits from the increase in productivity may be dissipated. In the model, based on Bernanke and...