A panel causality analysis of the relationship between financial development and economic growth in OECD countries

This study examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth. Thus, this study aims to find empirical shreds of evidence for the direction of the causality between financial development proxied by domestic credit to the private sector and per capita GDP growth by using the panel granger causality test of the Dumitrescu-Hurlin Test. For this purpose, we used a panel of 16 OECD countries from 2008 to 2019 to provide evidence of whether the supply leading hypothesis or demand following hypothesis or both holds. All econometric exercises are carried out for whole countries and high-income countries, and upper-middle-income country groups in the sample. Due to cross-sectional dependence among the sample countries, we determine the degree of integration of each variable by employing the second-generation panel unit root tests of CIPS. We continue our analysis with the panel causality test developed by Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) to determine the direction of the causality between variables. For this purpose, we performed three sets of causality analyses. In the first one, we include all countries in the panel. We then divided the countries into two sub-groups based on the income classification and the level of financial development in these countries proxied by domestic credit to the private sector. The causality test results, including all countries in the sample, indicate that the hypothesis holds the supply leading hypothesis during the sample period. This means that even though this panel contains countries with a development level, financial development still seems to be a pre-condition for economic growth for these nations. We also obtain the same results when we include high-income countries in the sample. The study results provide compelling evidence for the relationship between economic growth and financial development since the sample includes countries with different levels of financial development with different degrees of per capita GDP growth.

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