IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lec/leecon/10-18.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The African Credit Trap

Author

Listed:
  • Svetlana Andrianova

    ()

  • Badi Baltagi

    ()

  • Panicos Demetriades

    ()

  • David Fielding

Abstract

We put forward a plausible explanation of African financial underdevelopment in the form of a bad credit market equilibrium. Utilising an appropriately modified IO model of banking, we show that the root of the problem could be unchecked moral hazard (strategic loan defaults) or adverse selection (a lack of good projects). We provide empirical evidence from a large panel of African banks which suggests that loan defaults are a major factor inhibiting bank lending when the quality of regulation is poor. We also find that once a threshold level of regulatory quality has been reached, improvements in the default rate or regulatory quality do not matter, providing support for our theoretical predictions.

Suggested Citation

  • Svetlana Andrianova & Badi Baltagi & Panicos Demetriades & David Fielding, 2010. "The African Credit Trap," Discussion Papers in Economics 10/18, Department of Economics, University of Leicester, revised Oct 2010.
    • Handle: RePEc:lec:leecon:10/18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.le.ac.uk/economics/research/repec/lec/leecon/dp10-18.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    • Svetlana Andrianova & Badi H. Baltagi & Panicos O. Demetriades & David Fielding, 2010. "The African Credit Trap," Working Papers 1004, University of Otago, Department of Economics, revised May 2010.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blundell, Richard & Bond, Stephen, 1998. "Initial conditions and moment restrictions in dynamic panel data models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 87(1), pages 115-143, August.
    2. Rioja, Felix & Valev, Neven, 2004. "Does one size fit all?: a reexamination of the finance and growth relationship," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 429-447, August.
    3. Paul Milgrom., 1987. "Adverse Selection without Hidden Information," Economics Working Papers 8742, University of California at Berkeley.
    4. Xavier Freixas & Jean-Charles Rochet, 1997. "Microeconomics of Banking," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262061937, January.
    5. Andrianova, Svetlana & Demetriades, Panicos & Shortland, Anja, 2008. "Government ownership of banks, institutions, and financial development," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(1-2), pages 218-252, February.
    6. Gries, Thomas & Kraft, Manfred & Meierrieks, Daniel, 2009. "Linkages Between Financial Deepening, Trade Openness, and Economic Development: Causality Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 37(12), pages 1849-1860, December.
    7. Windmeijer, Frank, 2005. "A finite sample correction for the variance of linear efficient two-step GMM estimators," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 126(1), pages 25-51, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Demetriades, Panicos O. & James, Gregory A., 2011. "Finance and growth in Africa: The broken link," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 113(3), pages 263-265.
    2. Samargandi, Nahla & Kutan, Ali M., 2016. "Private credit spillovers and economic growth: Evidence from BRICS countries," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 56-84.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Dynamic panel data; African financial under-development; African credit markets;

    JEL classification:

    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • O16 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lec:leecon:10/18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Mrs. Alexandra Mazzuoccolo). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/deleiuk.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.