Despite its importance for development, long-term finance is particularly scarce in countries with lower income levels. This not only results in unrealised growth and employment creation at the national level and at the level of individual firms, but also undermines a broader shift towards...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We illustrate this on the basis of about 3,100 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Prior to the financial crisis, spread fluctuations in advanced economies are an order of...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...

A new global framework for governing large-scale land-based investments is in the making. By being voluntary and with the Voluntary Guidelines for the Governance of Tenure (VGGT) as the most well-known example of this new generation of rights-based governance instruments, many observers agree...

An energy resource as a production input plays a major role in various economic sectors, including commodity production, transportation, and electricity generation. However, increased energy consumption may lead to more air pollution, resulting in negative health impacts in a society. The main...

Most of the literature that explored the relationship between financial development and economic growth taking into consideration the roles played by institutional quality in the ECOWAS region still debates on the roles of institutional quality on economic growth. This study used data from...