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As hypothesized by Gerschenkron (1962), lower income countries would tend to grow at a faster rate than higher income countries and, as a result, their average incomes would converge in the long run. In addition to that hypothesis, theoretical studies to assess the impact of globalization on international economic convergence remain ambiguous. To address both the issues simultaneously, this study attempts to analyze the trend and possible association between the two, i.e., cross-country per capita income differential and globalization. This study incorporates a long list of countries (160 Countries) for a fairly long period of time (from 1990 to 2019). As expected, the study found a steady rise in global trade to GDP ratio, indicating a rising level of globalization in the assessment period. In addition to that, the study also found a rising level of average cross-country per capita real GDP (based on purchasing power parity (PPP)) differential in the given time horizon, contradicting Gerschenkron hypothesis. Finally, applying the ARDL bounds testing procedure, the study finds that cross-country per capita income differential and globalization are cointegrated; and the net effect of globalization on income differential is positive. Therefore, given the data, the study concludes that, over the years, along with rising level of globalization, per capita income differential diverges which causes cross-country per capita income inequality to rise.

The purpose of this paper is to test the Feldstein and Horioka (FH), theory that capital mobility should be low if there is high correlation between saving and investment, in some African countries.

This paper tests the cointegration between saving and investment using bounds testing approach to cointegration and derive the long-run elasticities using autoregressive-distributed lag (ARDL) and Phillips-Hansen fully modified OLS for African countries over the period 1960-2008. This paper conducted the test for unit root properties using Augumented Dick-Fuller procedure.

Their main findings are: investment and saving are strongly cointegrated for The Gambia and Burkina Faso and marginally cointegrated for Ghana, Mali, Cote d'Ivoire and Benin when investment is the dependent variable and there is evidence of cointegration between saving and investment when saving is the dependent variable for Senegal and Niger and no evidence of cointegration for Cameroon, Chad and Togo; the long-run coefficients on saving are low or negative implying low correlation. This paper concludes that Feldstein and Horioka theory could not be ruled out in African countries investigated.

This paper is the original paper conducted on West African countries. This study has not across any paper bearing the same title on the countries of coverage.

This paper analyses the relationship between financial sector development (FSD) and life insurance inclusion in India during the period from 1971–1972 to 2016–2017. The study analyses the effect of financial deepening on life insurance inclusion in India.

The study employs augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) unit roots test to check the stationarity properties of the time series data. It estimates a life insurance inclusion model using the auto-regressive distributed lag model (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration.

The study finds evidence of a cointegrating relationship between financial deepening and life insurance inclusion in India. A significant error correction coefficient indicates automatic adjustments to short-run disequilibrium, reinforcing the cointegrating relationship between financial sector and life insurance inclusion.

A major limitation of the study is that it excludes the first-time sum assured (FSA) contributed by the private sector life insurance companies due to lack of data availability.

The results of the study call for faster expansion of the financial sector and provision of a low interest rate regime in the Indian economy. The study invokes the need for sufficient training to the personnel in the banking and non-banking institutions to cater to the complex needs of life insurance buyers.

The paper estimates the link between FSD and life insurance inclusion and introduces a new measure of life insurance demand, the life insurance inclusion, measured using the FSA.

This paper examines the long‐term relationship between saving and investment as a criterion for assessing international capital mobility for the case of Saudi Arabia, the largest economy among the Middle Eastern and Arab nations.

The approach is modeled on Feldstein and Horioka covering the period 1963‐2007 for Saudi Arabia. We use the bounds testing approach and the Gregory and Hansen cointegration methods to test for the long‐run relationship between saving and investment. Additionally, before testing for this relationship, we conduct unit root tests, including the additive outlier model developed by Perron with an endogenously determined structural break.

The study finds no evidence of a long‐run relationship between saving and investment and therefore concludes that capital is highly mobile in Saudi Arabia. This finding is plausible given the economic and financial reforms which have occurred in Saudi Arabia along with increased capital inflows into the country in the last few decades.

Of the limited studies so far on developing countries, none has considered the capital mobility issue for an oil‐dependent country.

Financial liberalization is assumed to be the integration of a country's local financial system with international financial markets and institutions. This integration usually requires that governments liberalize the domestic financial sector and the capital account. Financial sectors were liberalized in most of the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America within the early 1990s. Among these countries, emerging economies are those who promise huge potential for growth but also pose significant political, monetary, and social risks. Brazil and India are often compared among the major emerging economies. Despite these general similarities between them, there are notable differences in various aspects of opening the balance of payments capital account in both countries. In this chapter, we have tried to analyze the long-run as well as short-run relationship between quarterly growth rate of GDP with the stock market, real market, and money market macroeconomic variables in India and Brazil during the period from the first quarter of 1996–1997 to the second quarter of 2018–2019. To estimate the cointegration relationship between growth rate of GDP and its determinants, we employ the bounds testing procedure (modified-ARDL) developed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (2001, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 16(3), 289–326). According to our results, stock market plays a positive role in long-term growth in India. Although during the beginning period of the neoliberal reforms, India faced strong domestic political opposition, our study shows that liberalizing the financial market has been fruitful for long-term growth. Our results in case of Brazil show that inflation has a negative and significant impact on long-run growth rate of GDP. The results further show that the share of gross fixed capital formation in GDP in Brazil has a positive and significant long-run relation with the growth rate of GDP. The empirical results further indicate that just like India, liberalization of the financial market and allowing foreign capital inflows have been beneficial for the economy of Brazil in the long run.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the macroeconomic drivers of stock market development in Hong Kong during the period 1992Q4-2016Q3. Specifically, it investigates the impact of banking sector development, economic growth, inflation rate, exchange rate, trade openness and stock market liquidity on stock market development.

This paper uses quarterly time-series data covering the period 1992Q4-2016Q3, which have been obtained from various reliable sources. The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing procedure to identify both the long- and short-run macroeconomic drivers of stock market development in Hong Kong.

We find that banking sector development and economic growth have positive impacts on stock market development, whereas the inflation rate and the exchange rate have negative impacts on stock market development both in the long and short run. In addition, the results show that trade openness has a positive long-run impact but a negative short-run impact on stock market development.

Despite the phenomenal growth of stock market in Hong Kong, there are, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no relevant studies on the macroeconomic drivers of stock market development in Hong Kong. Therefore, this paper endeavours to enrich the literature by examining the macroeconomic drivers of stock market development in Hong Kong during the period 1992Q4-2016Q3.

The purpose of this paper is motivated by research-based assertions that: the causes of economic growth in countries like India are not well understood; they are not elucidated by using simple bivariate relationships between economic growth and other variables, taken one at a time; and dynamic linkages between growth, trade openness and financial sector depth are required for any comprehensive treatment of this inquiry.

This paper investigates the pivotal role of financial depth (defined as the relative importance in the economy of the banking sector or the stock market) and whether it bears any evidential relationship to trade openness and economic growth during the era of Indian post-globalization since 1990. Two key objectives are to uncover whether there is a long-run relationship between the variables and whether they can be said to cause one another. Autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedures and vector autoregressive error correction model (VECM) approaches were used to derive the results.

This paper affirms that the variables are indeed formally cointegrated. It was also found that trade openness, economic growth and financial sector depth Granger-cause each other.

This paper demonstrates that greater trade openness can predictably accelerate India’s economic growth. If policymakers wish to maintain sustainable economic growth in India, they can do so by encouraging both freer trade and financial market development in the long run.

No investigation of this type and sophistication has hitherto been performed for India. The methods developed for this study can also be applied to any of the vast range of countries for which dynamic growth-openness-financial depth interactions have not already been investigated.

This study attempts to re‐investigate the electricity consumption function for Malaysia through the cointegration and causality analyses over the period 1970 to 2005.

The study employed the bounds‐testing procedure for cointegration to examine the potential long‐run relationship, while an autoregressive distributed lag model is used to derive the short‐ and long‐run coefficients. The Granger causality test is applied to determine the causality direction between electricity consumption and its determinants.

New evidence is found in this study: first, electricity consumption, income, foreign direct investment, and population in Malaysia are cointegrated. Second, the influx of foreign direct investment and population growth are positively related to electricity consumption in Malaysia and the Granger causality evidence indicates that electricity consumption, income, and foreign direct investment are of bilateral causality.

The estimated multivariate electricity consumption function for Malaysia implies that Malaysia is an energy‐dependent country; thus energy‐saving policies may have an inverse effect on current and also future economic development in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the inter‐temporal causal relationship between financial sector development and poverty reduction in Zambia. The paper attempts to answer one critical question: does financial sector development in Zambia lead to poverty reduction?

The paper uses the newly developed autoregressive distributed lag‐bounds testing procedure, which has numerous advantages, especially when the sample size is small. In addition, the paper uses three proxies of financial development, namely broad money supply (M2/GDP), domestic credit to the private sector as a ratio of gross domestic product (DCP/GDP) and domestic money bank assets (DMBA), against private per capita consumption, a proxy for poverty reduction.

When the broad money supply ratio (M2/GDP) is used as a proxy for financial sector development, poverty reduction seems to cause the development of the financial sector. However, when the DCP and the DMBA are used, financial development seems to cause poverty reduction, and not the other way round.

The empirical results of this paper show that the causal relationship between financial development and poverty reduction is sensitive to the choice of proxy used for financial development.

This paper is the first of its kind to empirically examine the causal relationship between financial deepening and poverty reduction in Zambia using modern econometrics techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic and long-run relationships among public debt, FDI and output growth in five individual Caribbean countries over the period 1975–2015.

Zivot and Andrews (1992) unit root test with structural break is used to examine the stationarity of the variables and then the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing procedure is used to ascertain existence of cointegration among them. Finally, order-invariant generalized forecast error variance decomposition (GFEVD) is used to establish the strength of the causal relationship between the examined variables.

The results confirm that the examined variables are cointegrated. FDI, domestic investment, trade openness, human capital (HC) and institutional quality were found to have significantly positive effects on economic growth, while higher public debt and inflation rates hampered growth. GFEVD revealed unidirectional Granger causality running from FDI to economic growth in two countries; unidirectional causality from growth to FDI in two other countries; and bidirectional causality between growth and FDI in one other country. The results also indicate one-way causality from output growth to public debt in three countries and bidirectional causality between these two variables in two other countries.

The implication is that the Caribbean Governments may need to adopt effective debt management as a major policy and intensify efforts at utilizing loans obtained judiciously for human and capital projects that have direct positive net present value but, to secure strong and inclusive growth, these strategies must be linked to policies that enhance macroeconomic stability and the quality of their institutions, encourage capital inflows and domestic investments vis-à-vis domestic savings, and increase HC and trade earnings.

In contrast to extant studies of the public debt–FDI–output growth nexus, this study controls for the possibility of structural breaks in unit root tests along with performing bounds test for cointegration, variance decomposition analysis, Granger causality tests, and CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests for the stability of the dynamic output growth model. This is a unique contribution to the existing literature, and highlights the originality value of this paper.