This paper constructs new indicators of liquidity for equity, bond and money markets in major advanced and emerging market countries, documents their evolution and comovements, and assesses the extent to which such measures are determinants of selected spreads and proxy measures of countries'...

This paper examines the economic importance of stock markets in Africa. It discusses policy options for promoting the development of the stock market in Africa. The results of the paper show that the stock markets have contributed to the financing of the growth of large corporations in certain...

Only a minority of countries have succeeded in establishing a developed financial system, despite widespread financial liberalization. Confronted with this finding, the political institutions view claims that sustained financial deepening is most likely to take place in institutional...

This paper studies the apparent contradictions between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit...

The proximity of the European Union, the prospect of membership, and actual entry by the New Member States (NMS) increased economic and financial integration in the region, leading to fast economic growth based on sizeable capital inflows. EU membership helped in developing sound macroeconomic...

This paper analyzes certain policies that are typical of a number of rapidly growing East Asian countries in which a fixed exchange rate, combined with a surplus labor market, has made domestic assets relatively inexpensive, generating high rates of FDI as well as domestic capital formation....

This paper summarizes recent arguments/findings on two aspects of foreign direct investment (FDI): its correlation with economic growth and its determinants. The first part focuses on recent literature regarding positive spillovers from FDI while the second deals with the determinants of FDI....

Standard theoretical arguments tell us that countries with relatively little capital benefit from financial integration as foreign capital flows in and speeds up the process of income convergence. We show in a calibrated neoclassical model that conventionally measured welfare gains from this...

The West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) regional securities market saw increasing activity in the last decade, but still fell short of supplying sufficient long-term financing for growth-enhancing public and private investment projects. In addition to providing an institutional...

We develop a new public domestic debt (DD) database covering 93 low-income countries and emerging markets over the 1975-2004 period to estimate the growth impact of DD. Moderate levels of non-inflationary DD, as a share of GDP and bank deposits, are found to exert a positive overall impact on...