Exploring the finance and growth relationship for emerging market economies

Abstract

This study focuses on alternative ways to measure financial sector development and the external factors that both directly and indirectly influence economic growth. The empirical results based upon panel data from 1985 to 2003 for a sample of emerging countries suggest three major conclusions. First, by including a range of alternative financial sector development measures and a variety of external policy-related factors in the model, the importance of supplying basic liquidity services, as measured by M3, becomes less important for emerging countries. Second, the empirical results suggest that while a basic level of deposit insurance protection might prove stabilizing for emerging economies, excessive levels of insurance may promote undue risk. Third, several competitive market structure and regulatory variables designed to measure efficiency in the intermediation process, such as net interest margin, and managerial efficiency as measured by overhead costs, are found to have a statistically significant, and in certain cases, unexpected impacts.