NON-BANK FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES (NBFIS) AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN MALAYSIA: AN APPLICATION OF THE ARDL BOUNDS TESTING APPROACH TO COINTEGRATION

This paper empirically examines the impact of Non-bank financial intermedi­aries (NBFIs) on economic growth in Malaysia using the time series data for the period 1976-2004. We employ a recently developed autoregressive distrib­uted lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration suggested by Pesaran et al (2001) which is more suitable for estimation in small sample size studies and also capable of testing the existence of long run relationship irre­spective of whether the underlying variables are integrated of order I(0), I(1) or mutually integrated. We found evidence of a stable long run cointegrating relationship between per capita real GDP and economic growth in Malaysia. The regression result suggests that the development of NBFIs has positive and sig­nificant long run impact on per capita real GDP in Malaysia