Many African countries have experienced episodes of weak growth since 1970 through the 2000s. A fundamental intermediation gap in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the extremely limited financing for medium to long term lending facilities to promote growth. Thus, given the importance of financial development on economic growth, this study investigates the impact of financial development on economic growth in SSA, which is sub-divided into low-, middle-and upper-income groupings to ascertain whether differences in income levels across countries affect the relative impact of finance on growth. The study adopts the dynamic and static panel data model to analyse 30 SSA countries using annual data over the 1985-2015 period. The findings indicate that financial depth and financial intermediation reduce per capita income growth in low-and middle-income countries. However, it increases growth in upper-income and the overall sample of SSA countries. Credit supply positively impacts growth in lowincome countries but exerts a significantly negative impact on growth in middle-income and the overall sample of SSA countries. Financial liberalisation promotes growth in upper-income and the overall SSA. However, it reduces growth in low-and middle-income countries. Financial development and financial † Late Dr. Mohamed Kargbo who has died of illness. In the past, he served as the Deputy Minister of Finance of Sierra Leone. He obtained a doctorate from Dalian University of Technology 4 years ago.

In recent years, China has uniquely implemented various policies to control housing prices, particularly its property- purchasing limitation policy. This research proposes a vector autoregression (VAR) model with likelihood-ratio (LR) tests to examine the effects of such a policy on housing prices at the national, provincial and city levels in China, with the use of monthly data from 2002 to 2013. The results show that at the national level, the effect of the policy is very significant, and the impact on housing prices is far greater than monetary and credit policies. However, the policy is not applicable at the provincial level. The policy has a significant role at the city level in first-tier cities, but no significant effect in second- tier cities. Overall, property-purchasing limitations inhibit the growth of housing prices to some extent, and the effects show strong regional characteristics, especially at the city level. Policymakers should therefore take into account regional characteristics in the formulation and implementation of a property-purchasing limitation policy.