The current economic crisis has affected all aspects of life, which has resulted in political instability, personal financial troubles, and a growing number of business bankruptcies. While these are serious issues, simply developoing a government policy that injects an economy with money is not an appropriate means to achieve economic recovery and long-term economic development unless combined with an effective and efficient governing system. The present research studies whether the strong relationship between governance and growth exists during economic crises or only during non-crisis periods. The results of the current research show that the global economic crisis has had an influence on the relationship between governance and economic growth. In addition, this study found that different levels of development affect the relationship between governance and growth differently during times of crisis. Consequently, the results of the current research show the instability in the relationship between governance and economic growth during the economic crisis ; this unsteadiness is a sign of the need for long-term strategies to promote global and national good governance practices that are not adversely affected by crises. / by Bassam A. Albassam. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

This dissertation is a reaction to the public policy failures that culminated in, prolonged, and exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. Between the winter of 2007 and the summer of 2009, the US private economy contracted severely. As of the summer of 2014, after a five-year recovery period, employment losses have been restored, but employment growth has not returned the US to its pre-crisis trend. This outcome is not the effect of a transient deviation that regularly happens as the economy moves through the business cycle; nor should the troubles in the US financial sector appear historically anomalous. The world's premier capitalist economy is prone to bouts of financial dysfunction. This feature is not simply a matter of the irrational exuberance of its investors, the euphoria of its speculators, or the folly of its bankers. I argue here that political-economic choices structure the distribution of financial crises at multiple scales. Broadly speaking, I find that the effects of financial crises on growth are uneven, affected by institutional structure, and carry important ramifications for the direction of change in the provision of financial services and its regulatory system. The thesis features four empirical chapters. In the first, I perform an econometric analysis of the effects of a wide variety of financial crises on employment growth by economic sector, for a sample of countries over a thirty-year period. The final three chapters are a case study of the US experience with the 2008 banking crisis and asset market crash, focusing on the role of the banking regulatory system in allocating losses over territory, on the economic performance of metropolitan areas, and on the distribution of losses within the financial sector in two major financial centers, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I reach my conclusions by using standard methodological tools within the sub-field of economic-geography and conceptual insights from the sub-field of financial-geography.