Many Caribbean financial systems are relatively well developed for their size but benefits are concentrated in a small part of the population. In several large countries, the financial development levels are below what is warranted by that country's own macroeconomic fundamentals. SMEs, in...

This study aims to identify policies that influence the development of financial institutions as measured across three dimensions: Dept.h, efficiency, and stability. Applying the concept of the financial possibility frontier, developed by Beck & Feyen (2013) and formalized by Barajas et al...

This paper examines how financial development affects the sources of growth-productivity and investment-using a sample of 145 countries for the period 1960-2011. We employ a range of econometric approaches, focusing on the CCA and MENA countries. The analysis looks beyond financial depth to...

International comparisons reveal that-even controlling for a host of explanatory factors-credit depth is exceptionally low in Mexico. Using panel data methods linking credit growth and fundamentals, this paper estimates a long-term gap between actual and expected credit of about 40 percent of...

In recent years, Brazil has achieved substantial progress in capital market development by building a diversified investor base and expanding the menu of available financial instruments. In this context, we evaluated the invested Brazilian market portfolio for a period spanning 2005-15. This is...

We investigate the link between gender inequality in financial inclusion and income inequality, with three contributions to the recent literature. First, using a micro-dataset covering 146,000 individuals in over 140 countries, we construct novel, synthetic indices of the intensity of financial...