Financial Structure and Economic Development: A Reassessment♣
该特刊论文探讨金融结构（金融机构及其服务的组合）如何影响经济增长和不平等，并分析这种关系是否随国家发展水平变化，对研究金融与发展的学者有参考价值。
While the literature on the effects of financial development is large, relatively few studies have examined whether and how financial structure—the mix of financial institutions and the services that they offer—matters for economic growth and inequality. Moreover, the literature has been largely silent about whether the relationships between financial structure and firm outcomes (performance and access to finance) change as a country develops. The group of papers published in this special section helps to fill those gaps in the literature. The four that appear here were part of a larger conference on “Financial Structure and Economic Development” that took place at the World Bank on June 16, 2011. Further information on the issue of financial structure in development can be found in other papers presented at the conference and available in World Bank Working Papers (Lin, Sun, and Jiang, 2009; Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Singer, 2011; Kpodar and Singh, 2011).1 The first of the papers in this issue by Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, Erik Feyen, and Ross Levine, uses quantile regressions to assess the relationship between economic and financial development at each percentile of the distribution of economic development. Thus, the quantile regressions provide information on how the associations between economic development and both bank and securities market development change as countries grow richer.