There may be a compelling discontinuity to financial sector development in that banks need to be supported early in development but need to be "weakened" later, at the expense of bank rents, to foster further development. The important question for policy is when and how to generate and manage this discontinuity so that it is not forced on society by costly and traumatic events such as bank failures.

"This paper reviews, appraises, and critiques theoretical and empirical research on the connections between the operation of the financial system and economic growth. While subject to ample qualifications and countervailing views, the preponderance of evidence suggests that both financial intermediaries and markets matter for growth and that reverse causality alone is not driving this relationship. Furthermore, theory and evidence imply that better developed financial systems ease external financing constraints facing firms, which illuminates one mechanism through which financial development influences economic growth. The paper highlights many areas needing additional research"--NBER website

Abstract: The first part of this paper reviews the literature on the relation between finance and growth. The second part of the paper reviews the literature on the historical and policy determinants of financial development. Governments play a central role in shaping the operation of financial systems and the degree to which large segments of the financial system have access to financial services. The paper discusses the relationship between financial sector policies and economic development.

There may be a compelling discontinuity to financial sector development in that banks need to be supported early in development but need to be weakened later - at the expense of bank rents - to foster further development. The important question for policy is when and how to generate and manage this discontinuity so that it is not forced on society by costly and traumatic events such as bank failures.In an economy where decisions are decentralized and made under conditions of uncertainty, the financial system can be seen as the complex of institutions, infrastructure, and instruments that society adopts to minimize the costs of trading promises when agents have incomplete trust and limited information.Building on a microeconomic general equilibrium model that portrays such fundamental financial functions, Bossone shows that, in line with recent empirical evidence, the development of financial infrastructure stimulates greater and more efficient capital accumulation.He also shows that economies with more developed financial infrastructure can more easily absorb exogenous shocks to output.The results call for addressing a crucial issue in the sequencing of reform in the financial sector: early in development, banks provide essential financial infrastructure services as part of their exclusive relationships with borrowers. Further economic development requires that such services be provided extrinsically to the bank-borrower relationship, clearly at the expense of bank rents.There may be a compelling discontinuity to financial sector development in that banks need to be supported early in development but to be weakened later - at the expense of bank rents - to foster further development. The important question for policy is when and how to generate and manage this discontinuity so that it is not forced on society by costly and traumatic events such as bank failures.This paper - a product of the Financial Economics Unit, Financial Sector Practice Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to study the links between financial sector and economic development and improve financial sector reform policies.

As the accelerated technological advances of the past two decades continue to reshape the United States' economy, intangible assets and high-technology investments are taking larger roles. These developments have raised a number of concerns, such as: how do we measure intangible assets? Are we accurately appraising newer, high-technology capital? The answers to these questions have broad implications for the assessment of the economy's growth over the long term, for the pace of technological advancement in the economy, and for estimates of the nation's wealth. In Measuring Capital in the New Economy, Carol Corrado, John Haltiwanger, Daniel Sichel, and a host of distinguished collaborators offer new approaches for measuring capital in an economy that is increasingly dominated by high-technology capital and intangible assets. As the contributors show, high-tech capital and intangible assets affect the economy in ways that are notoriously difficult to appraise. In this detailed and thorough analysis of the problem and its solutions, the contributors study the nature of these relationships and provide guidance as to what factors should be included in calculations of different types of capital for economists, policymakers, and the financial and accounting communities alike.

The primary objective of this book is to advance the state of the art in specifying and ?tting to data structural multi-sector dynamic macroeconomic models, and empirically implementing them. The fundamental construct upon which we build is the Ramsey model. A most attractive feature of this model is the insights it provides into the dynamics of an economy in tr- sition to long-run equilibrium. With some exceptions, Ramsey models are highly aggregated – typically single sector models. However, interest often lies in understanding the forces of e- nomic growth across multiple sectors of an economy and on how policy impacts likely play out over time. Such analyses call for moredisaggregatedmodelsthatcanbe?ttocountryorregional data.Thisbookshowshowto:(i)extendthebasicmodeltom- tiple sectors, (ii) how to adapt the basic model to account for policy instruments, and (iii) ?t the model to data, and obtain equilibrium values both forward and backward in time from the data points to which the model is initially ?t.

Finance matters. The level of a country's financial development helps predict its rate of economic growth for the following 10 to 30 years. The data are consistent with Schumpeter's view that services provided by financial intermediaries stimulate long- run growth.

This paper examines whether there is a threshold above which financial development no longer has a positive effect on economic growth. We use different empirical approaches to show that there can indeed be "too much" finance. In particular, our results suggest that finance starts having a negative effect on output growth when credit to the private sector reaches 100% of GDP. We show that our results are consistent with the "vanishing effect" of financial development and that they are not driven by output volatility, banking crises, low institutional quality, or by differences in bank regulation and supervision.

During recent decades, Korea has been one of only a handful of countries that have made the successful transformation to become a developed nation by simultaneously achieving persistent economic growth combined with a democratic political system. Experts and political leaders worldwide have attributed this achievement to investments in people or, in other words, the power of education. Whilst numerous books have highlighted the role of industrial policies, technological growth, and international trade in Korea’s development process, this is one of the first to focus on the role of human capital. It shows how the accumulation of human capital aided transformation and helps explain the policies, strategies and challenges that Korea faces now and in the future.

The inadequacies of many past studies that have tried to highlight the causes of the persistent underdevelopment in developing countries—such as Nigeria—have been noted to derive mainly from the focus and, in some cases, the methodologies adopted by the researchers. It has been suggested that, although many researchers recognize the inability to reproduce sufficient profit as undermining the capitalist accumulation process (and as a result the development of an economy), they have nevertheless often tended to ignore the importance of the political-economic arrangement and historical factors in the formation of expectations about the rate of profit. Indeed, in some cases, they have failed to provide a substantive account of these critical variables. This book highlights how the inherent contradictions of the contemporary political-economic arrangement and some historical factors undermined the peculiar capital accumulation processes in Nigeria, which, in turn, has slowed economic development in the country. This book contributes to the field of Nigeria studies by filling gaps that exist in both theoretical and empirical literature on growth and development in the country, deviating from the orthodox approach of analysing the nation’s problems purely based on the factors internal to the country and by imposing ready-made theoretical logics on history. Rather, it studies Nigeria’s problems in juxtaposition with the world system and imposes historical evidence on theoretical logics. This book represents a good resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses on area studies. Researchers and policy-makers will also find it useful as a reference.