The role of financial innovation on economic growth in developing countries has not been actively pursued. Stemming from the finance-growth nexus, literature suggests that financial innovation has a relationship to growth, which could be either positive or negative. Implicitly, financial innovation has a good and a dark side that affects growth. This study establishes the causal relationship between financial innovation and economic growth in Zimbabwe empirically. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds tests and Granger causality tests on financial time series data of Zimbabwe for the period 1980-2013, the study finds that financial innovation has a relationship to economic growth that varies depending on the variable used to measure financial innovation. A long-run, growth-driven financial innovationis confirmed, with causality running from economic growth to financial innovation. Bi-directional causality also exists after conditionally netting-off financial development. Policies that enhance economic growth inter-twined with financial innovation are essential, if developing countries, such as Zimbabwe, aim to maximize economic development

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The study investigated the technical efficiency of the commercial banks in Zimbabwe during the period 2009–2015. The study entailed the decomposition of the technical efficiency into pure technical and scale efficiency to understand the sources of the technical inefficiency in the commercial banks in Zimbabwe. To accomplish the task, the study sampled 11 commercial banks of which 6 are domestic and the other 5 are foreign banks. The study used the data envelopment analysis method. The results of the study revealed that commercial banks in Zimbabwe are technically inefficient with an efficiency score of 82.9%. The average pure technical and scale efficiency scores were 96.6% and 85.6%, respectively. The results imply that technical inefficiency of the Zimbabwean commercial banks is mainly a result of scale inefficiency emanating from decreasing returns to scale. The deduction is that commercial banks in Zimbabwe are operating at below their optimum capacity and hence have scope to increase their operations in order to improve on technical efficiency.