تعامل بین رشد اقتصادی و مالی

This paper presents a model of financial and economic development which assumes the consumption of real resources by the financial sector. Financial development occurs endogenously as the economy reaches a critical threshold of economic development. Compared to financial autarky, financial intermediaries allocate savings, net of their costs of operation, to more productive investments. Whenever the technology financed by intermediaries is more capital-intensive than that operated in financial autarky, the growth effect of financial development is ambiguous. As a result, financial development may be unsustainable. However, when financial development is sustainable, the credit market becomes more competitive and more efficient over time, and this could eventually contribute to economic growth. Nonetheless, given monopolistic competition in the financial sector, the level of entry into the credit market is generally inefficient. For instance, with diminishing returns to specialisation, entrants might be too few at the early stages of economic development and too many later on.

Beginning with the cross-country analysis of King and Levine, 1993a and King and Levine, 1993b, several econometric studies based on linear methods have provided empirical support for the leading view that finance promotes growth.1 However, additional empirical work indicates that, while being strongly positive at relatively high levels of per-capita income, the relation between financial development and growth is generally weak or insignificant at relatively low levels of per-capita income, as is the case in the cross-section analyses by Deidda and Fattouh (2002) and Harris (1997), or even negative, as in Xu (2000).2 Moreover, historical country-studies such as Cameron, 1967 and Cameron, 1972, Goldsmith (1969), and McKinnon, 1973 and McKinnon, 1989 suggest that whether financial development effectively drives subsequent economic growth or not depends ultimately on the efficiency of the financial institutions and other related conditions in the economy.

“Although conclusions must be stated hesitantly and with ample qualifications, the preponderance of theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence suggests a positive, first order relationship between financial development and economic growth […][…]”, Levine (1997, p. 688). This paper recognizes that financial institutions might play an important role in economic growth. However, the empirical evidence also suggests that the link between finance and growth is positive and strongly significant only at relatively high levels of economic development. For relatively less developed economies, the relationship is much weaker, if not insignificant or even negative.