Financial Literacy, Financial Development and Economic Growth

ABSTRACT While significant progress has been made in exploring the importance of financial literacy, its impact on economic growth and financial development from a macroeconomic point of view remains thinly understood. This paper provides fresh evidence on the relationship between financial literacy, financial development and economic growth. We utilise a novel dataset for 61 countries over the period 1999–2014 and employ a panel quantile regression model. We provide strong evidence that higher financial literacy levels lead to higher GDP per capita growth, and the size of the impact is higher at lower quantiles of the conditional growth distribution. As financial development increases, its positive impact on economic growth diminishes, indicating an inverted U‐shaped relationship. High levels of financial literacy mitigate the diminishing returns of financial development on GDP per capita growth by an average of 7.41%. Interestingly, in higher quantiles of the conditional growth distribution, the mitigating effect increases to 9.23%.