Non-linearities Caused by “Too Much Finance Effect†: Exploring the Myth and Reality for Developed and Developing Countries

Existing literature on relationship between financial development (FD) and economic growth (EG) has presented dichotomous observations: a linear relationship by many of the studies and yet an inverted U-shaped relationship observed by number of renowned researchers. Most of the studies used narrow measures like credit to GDP growth ratio for measurement of financial development. Moreover, many of the researches have taken only the post-Global Financial Crisis data or neglected the data pre-1990s and most of the researches related to developing countries are on single-country data. Therefore, this relationship requires re-estimation to arrive at some conclusive results. This paper explores the relationship between financial development and economic for both developed and developing countries based on broader measures of financial development (financial access, financial depth, and financial efficiency). Panel Corrected Standard Error regression model is used to evaluate the relationship for 23 developed and 35 developing countries. Our results observe contrasting facts for developed and developing countries. For developed countries, we observed an inverted U-shaped relationship between FD and EG. The contributing sub-components of FD are financial depth and efficiency. However, financial access is observed to have a U-shaped relationship. However, for developing countries, we don’t observe an inverted U-shaped relationship but linear relationship between FD and EG. The contributing sub-components are financial depth and financial efficiency.