Correlates of Stock Market Development and Economic Growth: A Confirmatory Study from Ghana

The study confirms the debate on whether stock market development correlates to economic growth. The dimensions used for the stock market development consisted of market liquidity, size, and capitalization. Economic growth was represented by the real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate. Based on secondary data obtained from the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) and Ghana Statistical Service from 2014 to 2018, a correlational research design was adopted to analyze the data with SPSS 20v by using bivariate and regression. The study found that there is a high positive relationship between market liquidity and economic growth, a moderate negative relationship between market size and economic growth, and a moderate positive relationship between market capitalization and economic growth. Also, the stock market development of market liquidity, size, and capitalization predict 95.7 percent of economic growth. The study summarized that there is a high positive association between stock market development and economic growth as a confirmatory revelation, but all the relationship results were not statistically significant. The result points to the casualty of the relationship between stock market development and economic growth. The study recommends that more firms must be encouraged to be listed on GSE to enhance economic growth in Ghana.

Methodological Approaches to Assessing of the Regional Stock Market Development

The paper shows the influence of activity of regional corporations at stock market on the development of regional economy in general. Various scientific approaches to the assessment of the influence of financial markets on overall economic situation were considered in the course of the research. The need for detailed study of functioning of regional securities markets, as well as detailed study of their peculiarities and courses of development was revealed. The methods of analysis of regional results of activities of legal entities at securities market were developed on the basis of tax reporting of issuers and assessment of investment attractiveness of regions. The following tasks were solved: study of the normative base regarding dealings of legal entities at stock market, analysis of investment attractiveness of regions, analysis of indicators of statistical tax reporting, development of the methods of assessment of business activity of organizations at stock market, carrying out the assessment of correlation dependence of the indicators of investment attractiveness of regions and statistical tax reporting with gross regional product of the Siberian Federal District entities. Following the assessment results a conclusion of the dependence of economic development of the region with its investment potential and dynamics of corporate investment activity in the respective territory was drawn. Tax incentive of investment activity of regional companies was marked as significant direction of state policy at securities market.

Stock market development: a reflection of governance regulatory framework in Nigeria

PurposeThe article examines the possible long-run and short-run impact of regulatory quality on stock market performance in Nigeria for 1996–2019 period.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test and cointegrating regression techniques.FindingsFindings reveal that regulatory quality positively and significantly influences the performance of stock market, which strengthens the view that market-enhancing governance can engender an improvement in stock market performance. The study further demonstrates that quality of the regulatory environment is a critical component of market operations, since the improvement of the operation of stock market performance depends on appropriate policy measures, which could be the outcome of improved governance.Practical implicationsIt is suggested that, while improving the institutional environment is a challenge to regulators, there is need for strong and effective regulatory mechanism to enhance the development of stock market in the country.Originality/valueBased on the two competing hypotheses and limited attention, previous studies accorded the role of regulatory quality in the performance of stock market in the context of Nigeria. This study assessed the gap in the literature by taking the task of validating the impact of regulatory quality on stock market development.

Corporate Governance from a Cross-Country Perspective and a Comparison with Romania

This paper investigates corporate governance from a cross-country perspective and makes a comparison with Romania. There are studies that examine the corporate governance issues related to Romanian companies, but these studies provide only qualitative and descriptive accounts of the research topic, with limited cross-country analysis. The present paper complements the literature by producing a quantitative analysis of cross-country corporate governance and makes a comparison with Romania. For this purpose, a set of corporate governance indicators from a large sample of 39 advanced and developing countries was collected for the 2006–2020 period. In terms of corporate governance dimensions, it was found that Romania underperforms other developing countries in the dimensions of director liability and ownership and control, while it outperforms them in the dimensions of corporate transparency, disclosure, and shareholder rights. The results indicate that the stagnant corporate governance scores and the low development level of stock markets stand out as important business challenges for the country. The correlation and regression analyses show that stock market development is closely associated with corporate governance dimensions and, overall, corporate governance scores matter greatly for the economic growth of countries, such as Romania, which can benefit greatly from the improvement of corporate governance codes and practices in the private sector.

ICT Adoption and Stock Market Development in Africa: An Application of the Panel ARDL Bounds Testing Procedure

The nexus between Information Communication Technology (ICT) and stock market development has been predominantly based on studies of the developed markets and high-income economies of the world. The objective of this study was to examine the causal relationship between ICT adoption and stock market development in Africa. The study examined a panel of 11 African stock exchanges for the period 2008–2017 and employed the panel ARDL bounds testing procedure to test for cointegration and examine the causal relationship between ICT adoption and stock market development. The dependent variable employed was the stock market development index (FINDEX), while the independent variable was the ICT adoption index (ICTDEX), and the financial freedom index (FFI) was employed as a control variable. Firstly, the results of the study documented that the variables are cointegrated in the long term. Secondly, the results of the study documented a bi-directional causal relationship (complementarity) between ICT adoption and stock market development. In essence, ICT adoption and stock market development reinforce each other. Thirdly, the study established a causal relationship running from financial freedom to stock market development. This lends credence to the notion that financial market deregulation promotes stock market development. Lastly, a positive causal relationship that ran from financial freedom to stock market development was documented. This study contributes to the body of knowledge in the sense that it is the first study to examine the phenomenon of the ICT–stock market development nexus by employing a panel study. Hitherto, studies were mainly country-specific in nature. The findings of the research imply that policymakers should be more resolute when formulating ICT policies, as ICT adoption can drive stock market development and vice versa for better economic growth. Policymakers should embrace policies that support the deregulation of stock markets as this will lead to the development of the latter.

Nexus between Governance Indicators & Sustainable Stock Market Development in Pakistan: Evidences from Symmetric and Asymmetric Analysis

The hidden non-linear association between governance indicators & stock market development (SMD) of Pakistan has been scrutinized in this study by using two comparative co-integrating techniques known as ARDL (Auto-regressive Distributed Lag) & NARDL (Non-linear ARDL). Empirical evidence suggests that misrepresented inferences arise by ignoring hidden non-linearity nexus between the variables. The ARDL results indicate that political stability & absence of violence/terrorism does not impact directly the SMD of Pakistan. Voice & accountability positively and significantly impact SMD, but rule of law does not impact SMD of Pakistan directly. The regulatory quality is highly significant and negatively impacts SMD. Contrarily, the NARDL frame indicates significant differences amid coefficients of components of governance index, denoting asymmetric links between variables. The Positive & Negative sums of partial decompositions of Rule of Law, Regulatory Quality, Political Stability & Absence of Violence/Terrorism (PS&AVT), and Voice & Accountability (V&A) significantly impact SMD. The impact of partial Negative multipliers of Regulatory Quality, and PS&AVT has a highly significant and negative impact, while V&A has a significant and positive impact on SMD. The impact of Positive partial multipliers of all variables is positive and significant except V&A. The comparative diagnostics extricate precariousness in policy moratorium. This study will add credence to the predictive power of governance indicators towards SMD of Pakistan by incorporating Positive and Negative decomposed multipliers.

Does Financial Development Raise Tourism Demand? A Cross-Country Panel Evidence

This study examines the effects of bank and stock market development on three tourism demand indicators: number of tourist arrivals, expenditure to gross domestic product ratio, and expenditure per arrival. We analyze annual data spanning the period 1995-2018 for a sample of 207 countries. The theoretical contribution of this study is threefold: first, we assess a variety of financial development indicators; second, we employ cross-sectionally augmented distributed lags estimator that produces estimates robust to the dependence structure in the data; third, using data on a wide assortment of countries, we generalize the findings of several country-specific case studies. We observe that financial development affects both tourist arrivals and tourism expenditure positively. However, the gains in tourist arrivals are more significant relative to those in tourism expenditure. Furthermore, we find the responsiveness of tourism demand to financial development to vary with the income level.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE STOCK MARKETS: AN EMERGING MARKET PERSPECTIVE

There are numerous studies that examine the impact of social media on the stock market performance but there is a paucity of such evidences from the emerging economies. Today many multinational banks and other financial conglomerates from the developed countries are expanding their operations to the emerging markets, known for their rapid growth. The businesses in developed countries prefer using social media to reach out to their stakeholders. This might be a challenge as emerging markets are very different from the developed markets in terms of infrastructure and stock market development. This study performs the sentiment analysis of the tweets about the Indian companies that are a part of Nifty50 or any sectorial index, for a period of 15 months. The results from the Granger-causalty tests indicate that the Twitter sentiments have a significant relationship with the indices related to the banking and financial sectors of the Indian stock markets. Results from the Impulse Response Function reveal that, on the index returns, the impact of the negative sentiments stays for a longer period of time than the positive sentiments. This study would help businesses use social media effectively for information sharing and dissemination in the new environment.