Why Growth in Finance is a Drag on the Real Economy

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By Stephen Cecchetti, Professor of International Economics at the Brandeis International Business School and Enisse Kharroubi, Senior Economist in the Monetary Policy Division in the Monetary and Economic Department, Bank for International Settlements. Originally published at VoxEU

A booming financial sector means economic growth. Or does it? This column presents new evidence showing that when the financial sector grows more quickly, productivity tends to grow disproportionately slower in industries with either lower asset tangibility or in industries with higher research and development intensity. It turns out that financial booms are not, in general, growth-enhancing.

Finance and growth are intimately connected. For at least two decades, we have known that for economies to thrive, they need deep and broad financial systems (Levine 1997). But what is true for emerging market economies may not be true in the advanced world. That is, finance could very well be a two-edged sword. When credit is relatively low, or the financial sector’s share of employment modest, higher levels of debt add to growth. But there is a threshold beyond which it becomes a drag. There is now considerable evidence that productivity grows more slowly when a country’s government, corporate or household debt exceed 100% of GDP (see Reinhart and Rogoff 2010, Cecchetti et al. 2011, and Cecchetti and Kharroubi 2012).

The Link Between Financial Growth and Real Growth

In a recent paper (Cecchetti and Kharroubi 2015) we broaden the focus to the study of the relationship between financial growth and real growth. Or, more specifically, the effect of changes in the size of the financial system on total factor productivity growth. And, unlike the level relationship – where finance is good for a while – in this case the result is unambiguous. The faster the financial sector grows, the worse it is for total factor productivity growth. Using panel 20 countries over 30 years, we establish that there is a robust, economically meaningful, negative correlation between productivity and financial sector growth. We also find that causality likely runs from financial sector growth to real economic growth.

Graph 1 plots growth in real GDP per person employed on the vertical axis against two measures of financial sector growth on the horizontal: growth in private credit to GDP (left-hand panel) and growth in the share of total employment that is in financial intermediation (right-hand). We use data on 20 advanced economies from 1980 to 2010. In every case, data are averaged over five year periods and measured as deviations from the country mean. The figure shows a clear negative relationship between financial sector growth and productivity growth. The line running through the scatter plot has a negative slope with a coefficient that is significantly less than zero at the 1% level in both cases. ..............(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/why-growth-in-finance-is-a-drag-on-the-real-economy.html