The Roles of Political Regime and Financial Liberalisation in Shaping Financial Sector Development: Evidence from ASEAN-5 Countries

Abstract

Previous literature has consistently demonstrated the significant and favourable impact of financial development on economic growth. Nevertheless, the effects of political regime changes and financial liberalisation on financial system remain inconclusive. To address this gap, this study investigated the impact of political regimes and financial liberalisation on the development of the financial sector among five ASEAN countries namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand between 1997 to 2021. The study employs a panel dataset and a fixed effect estimator to measure how the variations in political regimes and their financial openness influenced the financial sector of each country. By applying the four categories of political regimes as introduced by Lührmann et al. (2018) and the financial openness index developed by Chinn and Ito (2006), this study found that electoral autocracy regimes provide greater advantages to financial development than democracy regimes. However, liberalizing financial system in these five countries does not help in developing the financial sector. This study provided new insight into the political economy of the financial systems in these countries.