Sound, deep, and efficient financial sectors are vital for high sustained, private sector-led growth. But financial sectors in their current form pose major problems for the economies of sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Insufficient access to credit by small and medium- sized enterprises constrains...

We develop a new public domestic debt (DD) database covering 93 low-income countries and emerging markets over the 1975-2004 period to estimate the growth impact of DD. Moderate levels of non-inflationary DD, as a share of GDP and bank deposits, are found to exert a positive overall impact on...