Financial development and poverty reduction : a study of middle-income countries

Abstract EN

This paper examines the impact of financial development on poverty in middle-income countries.

To that end, we made recourse to several estimation techniques over a study period stretching from 1980 to 2014.

The results indicate that development of the banking system does not necessarily improve the poor’s conditions.

However, development of the stock market does.

Through a sensitivity analysis, we concluded that our banking index is sensitive to the use of the poverty index, while our stock market index is sensitive to the choice of the middle-income vs.

high income studied countries.