This article introduces a special issue on lessons from the recent crisis on finance, growth, and stability. The papers in the special issue discuss (i) the benefits and risks of financial innovation and regulatory responses to these risks, (ii) the effect of finance and globalization on the real economy, and (iii) the role of government in providing credit guarantees. This introductory article provides a broader view on these issues and closes with ideas on the future research agenda in this field.

Financial systems all over the world have grown dramatically over recent decades. But is more finance necessarily better? And what concept of financial system – a focus on its size, including both intermediation and other auxiliary “non-intermediation” activities, or a focus on traditional intermediation activity – is relevant for its impact on real sector outcomes? This paper assesses the relationship between the size of the financial system and intermediation, on the one hand, and GDP per capita growth and growth volatility, on the other hand. Based on a sample of 77 countries for the period 1980–2007, we find that intermediation activities increase growth and reduce volatility in the long run. An expansion of the financial sectors along other dimensions has no long-run effect on real sector outcomes. Over shorter time horizons a large financial sector stimulates growth at the cost of higher volatility in high-income countries. Intermediation activities stabilize the economy in the medium run especially in low-income countries. As this is an initial exploration of the link between financial system indicators and growth and volatility, we focus on OLS regressions, leaving issues of endogeneity and omitted variable biases for future research.

This paper presents data on 76 partial credit guarantee schemes across 46 developed and developing countries. Based on theory, we discuss different organizational features of credit guarantee schemes and their variation across countries. We focus on the respective role of government and private sector and different pricing and risk reduction tools and how they are correlated across countries. We find that government has an important role to play in funding and management, but less so in risk assessment and recovery. There is a surprisingly low use of risk-based pricing and limited use of risk management mechanisms.