Financial Development and Poverty in Developing Countries: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

The paper investigates how financial development affects poverty indicators in developing countries. We implement this analysis with a poverty model using data from 42 Sub-Saharan African countries and covering the period 1980-2012. We employ the System Generalized Method-of-Moment (GMM) that is appropriate to control country specific effects and the possible endogeneity. The empirical evidence shows that there indeed exists a financial development threshold below which financial development has detrimental effects on poor and above which financial development could be associated with less poverty. The evidence then points an inverted U curve type response and the findings are robust to changes in poverty measures and to alternative model specifications, suggesting thus the non-fragility of the linkage between financial development and poverty for sub-Saharan African countries. Our findings are then promising and support the view that the relation between financial development and poverty reduction is not linear for sub-Saharan African countries.