In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an important factor in consumption smoothing and hence...

The short-term interest rate is the main driver of the Commonwealth of Australia government bonds' nominal yields. This paper empirically models the dynamics of government bonds' nominal yields using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. Keynes held that the central bank exerts...

The mid-term and long-term growth potential of China’s insurance industry is a subject ofsignificant interest to governments, business and academia. In this paper, the ‘‘worldinsurance growth curve’’ is used in conjunction with estimates of China’s future GDPgrowth to estimate the...

In this study we investigate the determinants of financing obstacles using survey data on a sample of around 5000 firms from the euro area countries. This completely new survey - started at the end of 2009 - gives us the opportunity to test whether firm characteristics such as size, age,...

The vast majority of firms in developing economies are micro and small enterprises owned by families whose members also provide the labour to the units. Often, they fail to grow in size even with the relaxation of credit constraints. In this paper, we show that frictions in the labour market...

This paper examines the impact of both bank- and market-based financial development on economic growth in South Africa during the period from 1980 to 2012. Unlike some previous studies, the current study employs means-removed average to construct both bank- and market-based financial development...

This paper analyzes detailed differences in patterns of financial development across the major Asian economies, including three of the region's largest economies (China, Japan and South Korea), to understand how these differences might affect possibilities for greater regional financial...

This paper discusses the financial landscape of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a region engaged in building an economic community (a "single market and production base") by 2015. In particular, it reviews where ASEAN's financial markets and institutions now stand and...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

We combine a novel measure of export-related financial needs at the product level with a unique database of firm-product export data (including names of the exporting firms) from five developing countries. Using the tools of survival analysis and taking into account firms' and products'...