رشد، توسعه مالی، هنجارهای اجتماعی و نهادهای قانونی

Do societal norms help to explain cross-country differences in financial development? We analyze whether societal norms, in addition to legal institutions, have an impact on financial development. In particular, we address the implications of the inclusion of societal norms on the analysis of the impact of financial development on economic growth. Our first conclusion is that societal norms indeed are important in explaining stock market capitalization, while this is not the case for the supply of bank credit. Secondly, the value added of including societal norms in models that explain financial development or, indirectly, economic growth largely coincides with the inclusion of formal institutions, like legal variables.

There is a renewed interest in the old debate on the relationship between financial development and economic growth. A central issue in this debate is whether the development of stock markets or banks is more appropriate to promote economic growth. Nowadays, proponents of the so-called legal view of financial development argue that the distinction between a bank and a market-based financial system is as such irrelevant. For instance, Levine, 1998, Levine, 2000 and Levine, 2001 and Levine et al. (2000), using cross-country data from La Porta et al., 1997 and La Porta et al., 1998 on differences in corporate law, regulation and law systems, show that it is more important to establish a general legal environment in which financial systems can operate efficiently. The legal view argues that only that part of financial development that is dependent on the legal system is important for fostering economic growth.

Using the examples of stock market capitalization and bank credit, we have analyzed the potential relevance of societal norms in explaining financial development and the impact of financial development on economic growth. Our starting point was the observation that the recent legal view literature on financial development and economic growth might take too narrow a view of the role of institutions and that informal institutions are perhaps unduly neglected. We first pointed out that the classification of countries according to their legal institutions with respect to the protection of shareholders and creditors is to a considerable extent similar to the classification of countries based on societal norms. There are, however, notable differences between the classification when one looks more closely at various specific legal and societal indicators. This comparison led to an analysis of the relevance of societal norms in addition to (as well as separate from that of) legal institutions on stock market capitalization and bank credit and also on economic growth. Based on our composite indicator for societal norms we find that societal norms are a significant determinant of stock market capitalization but not of bank credit. In particular we find that the impact of societal norms is very similar to that of the legal institutions. Compared to the latter, the value added of societal norms seems to be rather small when it comes to understanding the role of institutions at large for financial development. In our growth regressions we find that the exogenous part of stock market capitalization is not, but that of bank credit is significant for economic growth. But again, the way that societal norms (now in their role as an instrumental variable) enter growth regressions is similar to that of the legal institutional variables. Also, as is often a problem in cross-section regressions, the power of both societal norms and legal institutions as instruments is not very strong. This suggests that the way forward in the research on the relevance of financial development for economic growth is not so much to be found in extending the legal view with informal institutions, but perhaps more in exploiting the time-series dimension of the data, like in Beck and Levine (2001). In the end we find societal norms to be largely interchangeable with the legal variables (or that the latter to perform better). The usefulness of including societal norms alongside legal institutions is found to be limited not only when it comes to their impact on financial development and economic growth, but also where it concerns the search for powerful instruments in the growth regressions.