CD-ROM contains: World Bank data.

A country's level of financial development and the legal environment in which financial intermediaries and markets operate critically influence economic development. In countries whose financial sectors are more fully developed and whose legal systems protect the rights of outside investors, economies grow faster, industries dependent on external finance expand more quickly, new firms are created more easily, firms have more access to external financing, and firms grow faster.

Non-technical summary; The model; Risk and transactions costs; Financial intermediaries: researcher/mobilizer.

A country's level of fina ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) presents the full text of the December 2000 paper entitled "Financial Development and Economic Growth: An Overview," prepared by Mohsin S. Khan and Abdelhak S. Senhadji. The text is available in PDF format and the paper is part of the IMF's Working Paper series. This paper provides a review of literature on financial markets and discusses the relationship between financial development and economic growth.

How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification model of financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for the years 1974 and 2004. It is then used to study the international data, using cross-country interest-rate spreads and per-capita GDP. The analysis suggests that a country like Uganda could increase its output by 140 to 180 percent if it could adopt the world's best practice in the financial sector. Still, this amounts to only 34 to 40 percent of the gap between Uganda's potential and actual output. Charts and tables.