Relação entre o Desenvolvimento Financeiro e o Crescimento Económico na África Subsaariana

There is a vast literature on the effect of financial development on economic growth. There are arguments for considering that a well-functioning financial system is growth-enhancing and to expect that more finance lead to more growth. However, there are also arguments for considering that too much finance can harm economic growth, relying in the recent 2007-2008 global crisis. Therefore, recent empirical literature on the relationship between financial development and economic growth investigates whether this relationship is non-linear. This study contributes to this literature, by investigating the nature of this relationship in countries that are among the poorest countries, the Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a sample of 44 countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, for the period 1980-2015, we estimate a panel data model, allowing for a non-linear relationship between the level of financial development and economic growth. The estimation results suggest that the level of financial development, measured either by the domestic credit to private sector relative to GDP or by broad money relative to GDP, is good for economic growth only up to a point, after which it becomes harmful. Therefore, our empirical results confirm that the financial sector size exerts an inverted U-shaped effect on economic growth, even for Sub-Saharan African countries