The Impact of Financial Development on Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from Transitional Economies

This article examines the role of financial development in economic growth in a number of transitional economies where the financial systems were newly established or reformed only in the early 1990s to facilitate their transition from centrally planned economies to market-based ones. Based on a dataset collected from 29 transitional economies and 5 Asian developing economies covering the period 1990-2020, an empirical endogenous growth model is specified and estimated using the generalized method of moments (GMM). Three measures of financial development are used to investigate the relative role of the banking system and stock exchange market in the process of transition and growth. The results show that the three measures of financial development are crucial determinants of economic growth in transitional economies but the link seems to be in an inverted U-shape. This suggests the existence of thresholds for different channels of the financial sector to expand to positively influence growth. When becoming too large relative to the size of the economy, the financial system would have become a factor not conducive to growth. The growth convergence hypothesis is also confirmed and the impacts of other growth determinants are overall consistent with the extant literature.