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...