Given Sub-Saharan Africa's enormous resource needs for growth, poverty reduction, and other Millennium Development Goals, the development community has little choice but to continue to explore new sources of financing, innovative private-to-private sector solutions, and public-private...

China is often mentioned as a counterexample to the findings in the finance and growth literature since, despite the weaknesses in its banking system, it is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The fast growth of Chinese private sector firms is taken as evidence that it is...

The first part of this paper reviews the literature on the relation between finance and growth. The second part of the paper reviews the literature on the historical and policy determinants of financial development. Governments play a central role in shaping the operation of financial systems...

Banking markets are becoming increasingly international through financial liberalization and general economic integration. Using bank-level data for 80 countries for 1988-95, the authors examine the extent of foreign ownership in national banking markets. They compare net interest margins,...

The intensity of recent turbulence in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....

The authors examine the effects of taxation on financing policy using the corporate tax reform in 2001 in Croatia as a natural experiment. Since the extant literature on tax effects on capital structure studies listed firms in developed countries, it is worth investigating whether the same...

This article studies the extent to which participation in productive associations in Nicaragua contributes to increase individuals'access to social programs and credit services. By participating in productive associations, individuals give a good signal to firms and are rewarded with better...

In view of its increasing importance, and the dearth of information on return migration and its impacts on source households, this study uses data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study survey and assesses the impact of past migration experience of Albanian households on...

Using household level data from Bangladesh, this paper examines the differences in the rates of return to household attributes over the entire welfare distribution. The empirical evidence uncovers substantial differences in returns between an integrated region contiguous to the country's main...

The economy of the Philippines is open to trade and capital inflows, and has grown rapidly since 2002. Over the last 10 years, however, domestic investment, while stagnant in real terms, has shrunk as a share of GDP. In an open and growing economy, why the decline? Three reasons explain the...