This paper investigates how financial, trade, institutional and political liberalization policies have affected financial sector competition in Africa using updated data to appraise second generation reforms. The 'freedom to trade' and 'economic freedom' indices are employed. Hitherto,...

The goal of this paper is to assess how financial sector competition plays-out in the development of knowledge economy (KE). It contributes at the same time to the macroeconomic literature on measuring financial development and response to the growing field of KE by means of informal sector...

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 purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of financial dynamic policy options in money, credit, efficiency and size on consumer prices. Soaring food prices have marked the geopolitical landscape of developing countries in the past few years. Design/methodology/approach - The...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of policy options in financial dynamics (of money, credit, efficiency and size) on consumer prices. Soaring food prices have marked the geopolitical landscape of African countries in the past decade. Design/methodology/approach - We...

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 - Assessment of African financial development dynamic convergences in money, credit, efficiency and size. Design/Methodology - The empirical evidence is premised on 11 homogenous panels based on regions (Sub-Saharan and North Africa), income-levels (low, middle, lower-middle and...

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...

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...

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...