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The role of financial institutions and financial intermediaries in fostering economic growth (ECO) by improving the efficiency of capital accumulation, encouraging savings, and ultimately improving the productivity of the economy has been well established by the researchers. The reforms in the financial sector worldwide during the 1980s and 1990s were aimed at ushering in greater efficiency and more competitiveness.

The impact of financial market freedom (MF) on the overall development of the financial sector and thereby the growth in an economy is one of the most important considerations for policymakers over the years. This chapter aims to examine the causal relationship between financial MF and ECO in the Indian economy in the post-reform period.

This study investigates the relationship between financial inclusion (FI) and banks’ performance in the economy of Jordan using annual data of 13 commercial banks from 2009 to 2014. Performance is measured by gross income and return on assets (ROA) of these banks. To ensure the robustness of our results, we used six different measures of FI. These include credits for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), deposits for SMEs, number of ATMs, number of ATM services, number of credit cards, and new services. We found a significant impact of FI on ‘ performance when measured by gross income, and ROA, although our study displays different results when considering the effect of FI variables separately. Thus, FI contributes to enhance the banks’ performance. Therefore, the banks should devote more resources to increase FI as it benefits their profitability.

During the last few decades, rising intra-regional volumes of trade as well as air passenger traffic have been key characteristics of Asia-Pacific’s economic development. Although conceptual and empirical linkages between rising levels of trade and air passenger flows are often assumed, relatively little is known about the potential causality in these parallels. In this chapter, we seek to empirically uncover this causality through the application of heterogeneous Time Series Cross Section Granger causality analysis for the period 1980–2010. Four scenarios are found amongst the different country-pairs: (1) there is no co-evolution, implying that both patterns develop independently (e.g. Japan–Australia); (2) there is ‘real’ co-evolution in that both patterns influence each other through feedback loops (e.g. South Korea–Philippines); (3) air passenger traffic is facilitated by trade (e.g., South Korea–Philippines); or (4) trade is facilitated by air passenger traffic (e.g. Australia–Malaysia). Some possible interpretations of this heterogeneity are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to apply a poverty level decomposition approach to decompose the poverty by income sources and investigate the impact of government transfers on income inequality and rural poverty.

This paper uses the decomposition method of inequality and the decomposition method of poverty level by resource endowments to decompose the overall inequality and the overall poverty by income sources.

It is found that unequal income distribution rather than income endowments is mainly responsible for the existence of poverty. Government transfers and relief income, aiming at the poor, help alleviate inequality and poverty, but are not targeting the poorest. Unequal distribution of production subsidies actually lead to higher poverty incidence.

This paper has revealed that the poverty issue cannot be resolved with economic development alone if the issues including the inequality in income distribution are not solved. It is important to make government transfers/subsidies pro-poor.

A poverty level decomposition approach is first used to decompose the poverty by income sources in China.