Financial Development and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Eurozone

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between financial development and economic growth, within a panel framework that also accounts for trade openness, for the case of Eurozone using data covering the period 1990-2018. We explore this relationship using panel analysis techniques, robust to cross sectional dependence, in order to investigate the presence of causality between the variables. The cointegration results suggested that there is one cointegrated vector between the functions of economic growth, financial development and trade openness. In addition, the causality results of the study revealed, both in the short and long-run, that there is a unidirectional causal relationship between financial development and economic growth with direction from economic growth to financial development, as well as a unidirectional causality running from trade openness to financial development.