رابطه ی توسعه مالی و رشد اقتصادی در کشورهای خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقا:تجزیه و تحلیل علی پانل گرنجر بوت استراپ

This paper investigates the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. The panel causality testing approach, developed by Kónya (2006) [Kónya, L. (2006), exports and growth: Granger causality analysis on OECD countries with a panel data approach, Economic Modelling, 23, 978–992], based on the Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Wald tests with the country specific bootstrap critical values, is applied to the panel of fifteen MENA countries for the period 1980–2007. In order to capture the different aspects of financial development, six different indicators are used. Empirical results show that there is no clear consensus on the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth for all measurements of financial development and it is also observed that the findings are country specific.

The relationship between financial development and economic growth has been one of the hotly debated issues of whether the financial sector actually contributes to the real sector in the process of economic development. There is a great deal of empirical literature that has scrutinized the experiences of the developed and developing economies. This special interest comes from the intermediary role of financial markets between savers and investors in the process of economic development. Specifically, financial systems facilitate the trading, hedging, diversifying, and pooling of risk, allocate resources, monitor managers and exert corporate control, mobilize savings, and ease the exchange of goods and services (Levine, 1997). It is, therefore, widely accepted that well-functioning financial markets can positively contribute to economic growth in both developed and developing economies.

The relationship between financial development and economic growth has long remained an important issue of debate in the literature. With the emergence of endogenous growth theories which implicitly assume a causal relation from financial development to economic growth, the direction of causality is still an empirical issue. In this paper, the direction of causality among the variables in question is investigated for the period 1980–2007 for fifteen MENA countries. In order to see the impact of various aspects of financial development, six alternative financial development indicators are used. The method applied here is the recently proposed panel causality testing approach which takes into account cross-sectional dependence across the countries.