Were early banks important for economic growth? Evidence from Latin America

Luis Zegarra

Economic History of Developing Regions, 2018, vol. 33, issue 3, 225-258

Abstract: This article examines the available evidence from five Latin American economies (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru) and determines the effect of bank output on economic growth from 1870 to 1920. By relying on a panel error-correction model, the evidence suggests that bank output had a significant long-term impact on GDP per capita. In the long run, an increase of 1% in the level of bank output per capita caused an increase of 0.2%-0.3% in GDP per capita. Compared to other studies, however, our estimates suggest a relatively low impact of bank output on GDP per capita. The results are robust to changes in the specification, in the sample, and in the method of deflating nominal variables.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20780389.2018.1502036 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rehdxx:v:33:y:2018:i:3:p:225-258

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rehd20

DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2018.1502036

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History of Developing Regions is currently edited by Alex Klein and Alfonso Herranz-Loncan

More articles in Economic History of Developing Regions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().