This paper examines the changes in bank credit to private sector across six economies in the South Pacific. An extensive time-series and cross-country panel data allow us to draw new and broader lessons compared to existing research, which have tended to focus mostly on single countries with...

A body of evidence accumulated over the past several years, via different methods and estimation techniques, using firm –and household-level data, across many regions and countries show that finance matters for growth. Yet the role of finance in fostering growth in the Pacific, ironically, a...

This is the first study to simultaneously estimate the influence of market power and efficiency on profitability of banks in a Pacific Island context. Two market power hypotheses — the Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) and the Relative-Market-Power (RMP) hypotheses together with two measures...

Recognizing on one hand the importance of the MSE sector for growth and development of economies in the Pacific region and on the other, the financing constraints of the sector, we survey a group of MSEs in a Pacific island country and find that they may particularly be constrained by banks'...

In view of the prominent law-finance-economic growth theory and the continuing debate over it, this paper examines the applicability of the law–stock market development nexus in Fiji, an island economy in the South Pacific region, where economic growth performance has generally been considered...

Sustainable development has been an important but elusive goal for the highly vulnerable small states in the South Pacific. Events such as the current global financial crisis are likely to make this goal more elusive as the generous developed world donors, affected themselves, are compelled to...

This is the first study to systematically assess the significance of the standard money multiplier vis-à-vis the bank credit transmission channel in the case of Pacific Island Economies, focusing on Papua New Guinea. The vector autoregressive model comprising six variables - interest rate,...