This paper examines the relationaship between financial development and economic growth in ghana. This is done using time series econometric procedures by employing four proxy of financial development and applying granger causality test, cointegrating test, vector error correction model. The empirical results show that the direction of causalty is sensitive to the choice of proxy. It was discovered that finance follows in the direction of economic growth but doesnt necessarily lead to it. The empirical cointegration results weakly supprt long run relationship between financial development and economic growth.

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<p>Remittances were calculated to be approximately $318 billion in 2007, which is an increase of three times the amount of $102 billion in 1995, having these funds to become the second largest type of flows after foreign direct investment. The South-Eastern and Eastern-European countries welcomed 12% of the world’s remittances inflows in 2007, totalling $37 billion.</p><p>The impact of remittances on financial development of the South-Eastern and Eastern-European countries for the period 1994 – 2007 is studied and it is examined whether these funds contribute to increasing the aggregate level of deposits and credits intermediated by the local banking sector. Financial development is measured in two ways, either as bank deposits or as bank credits to private investors.</p><p>In order to analyze this effect panel data analysis is performed. Fixed effect regressions are performed to test for the effect of remittances on bank deposits and bank credits to private investors. The findings indicate that remittances have a robust positive effect on promoting financial development in South-Eastern and Eastern-European countries. It is observed that the effect on bank deposits is less robust than the effect on bank credits to private investors.</p>

The first chapter studies the effects of financial obstacles to productivity improvement in the context of trade reforms, by constructing a dynamic heterogeneous firms model with financial frictions. Trade reforms are considered beneficial because they confront the liberalized country’s firms with more competition from abroad and increase their incentives to become more efficient. This implies that if poor countries do not improve their productivities they might lose the intended gains from liberalization. Financial frictions however have been quoted an important obstacle for firms to improve their productivities. To address these issues, first, using data on 15 trade liberalization episodes, I document that more financially developed countries experienced more productivity growth after their trade liberalization. Second, I construct a dynamic heterogeneous firms model with financial frictions in financing costs for productivity improvement. Calibrated numerical exercises show that if a country does not improve its financial intermediaries at the outset of trade liberalization it may lose as much as %40 of potential output gains and productivity improvements. The result has policy implications regarding the simultaneous reforms in trade and financial intermediaries. The Second chapter is a cross country empirical analysis aiming to provide evidence for the effects of trade openness and financial development on firms decision to upgrade their technology and the impact on the distribution of firm size across countries. The idea is that reduction of trade barriers is likely to affect incentives of bigger firms to grow to export markets as well as incentives of smaller firms to innovate due to increased competition. Financial frictions, however are likely to limit the scope of these decisions and more so for smaller firms and capital intensive industries. This is likely to have heterogeneous effects on firms leading to changes in firm size distribution. I hypothesize that a combination of trade openness and low financial development increases the relative size of big to smaller firms. To test this hypothesis, I take advantage of cross country/industry differences in trade protection and financial development/needs to provide enough variation for identifying these effects. Using establishment level data from OECD countries, I provide evidence for this hypothesis, by performing double difference estimations. In addition using firm level data on 20,000 firms from World Bank’s enterprise survey, I provide more evidence that trade openness promotes productivity growth particularly for bigger firms in less financially developed countries. The finding contributes to the literature on importance of finance for firm growth by focusing on the channel of heightened competition due to trade. It highlights the importance of incorporating financial aspects of a country in trade analysis. The third chapter is an exercise exploring the welfare gains of trade in a North-South trade where counties are asymmetric in their ability to produce more sophisticated goods. The exercise is based on the model by Matsuyama (JPE 2000), where the world is a static Ricardian model with a continuum of goods and unit demand non-homothetic preferences. One country (the south) has comparative advantage in production of goods with lower income elasticity of demand. As a result, over time with uniform global improvement in technology in the form of smaller unit labor requirements, the terms of trade moves against south. The numerical exercise, calibrates stochastic interpretation of the model to for a specific choice of countries and provides evidence that over time, if the patterns of specializations are not changed drastically, the country specialized in production of less sophisticated goods disproportionately grows less than the other one and has the terms of trade moving against it. / text

This study examines the effect of financial development on economic growth in South Africa. South Africa is an interesting case study, as it provides a relatively rich environment in terms of data. While the finance and business sector has grown significantly in the last ten years becoming a major contributor to gross domestic product, the South African economy has been struggling to register positive output in the preceding years. The study utilizes an Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to cointegration and a Solow model to consider the role of banks, financial institutions, and financial markets independently. The results reveal that financial institutions have a considerable role in fostering economic development in the long run in South Africa. Conversely, financial market indicators do not have long run effects on growth in South Africa and in the short run, financial markets negatively influence growth. High foreign participation in the financial markets including ease of capital flows and currency volatility could be reasons for this result.

Yes / This chapter examines the conceptual and measurement issues involving financial inclusion. Rest of the chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 defines the concept of financial inclusion. Section 3 briefly discusses the barriers to financial inclusion. The next section outlines measurement issues and data sources involving financial inclusion. Finally, the last section of the study concludes.

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Yes / The paper examines the level of financial development of initial twenty shortlisted smart cities in India. • Results of the study revealed high inter-state and intra-state inequality as the cities with high FSI values and those with low FSI values are both located in the developed western and southern states. • A similar mixed picture emerges even for the less developed low income states such as Madhya Pradesh. • The study also highlighted large inter-state variations across the smart cities in financial development. • For a holistic approach to smart city development, a vibrant and developed financial sector is required.

Yes / This study considers the effects of financial development on output in a panel cointegration framework, focusing on the implications of trade and financial openness. Our analysis indicates that after controlling for cross-sectional dependence, the typical relationship between finance and output does not hold in the long run. This relationship, however, is re-established once we account for economic openness. While trade openness emerges as more important for developing countries, financial openness is more important for advanced economies. In the long run, causality runs from financial development to output in the advanced economies, while in developing economies causality is bidirectional. There is no short-run causality between financial development and output, however.

Yes / A number of studies have explored the factors influencing financial development. Among them are national legal origin, settler mortality hypothesis, institutional factors, political factors, macroeconomic policies including capital account openness, social capital and also cultural factors. The relationship between financial development, human capital and economic growth, although acknowledged in the theoretical literature remains less explored at the empirical level. In this study we examine interaction between financial development, human capital and economic growth. The study aims to understand and examine how financial development is related to human capital accumulation and economic growth in a unified framework. In a cross-country panel data context using rigourous econometric techniques we examine these questions.