Studies have continued to emerge on the transmission channels through which finance influences growth. It has been argued that more finance without efficient institutions may not yield more growth. Meanwhile, studies on sub-Saharan Africa are sparse. None of existing studies have examined the moderating effect of institutions on finance–growth nexus in Southern Africa despite the weak institutions in the sub-region. Deviating from extant studies, this study contributes to general discussion by taking care of cross-sectional dependence among countries within an economic bloc. Driscoll and Kraay’s nonparametric covariance matrix estimator is used to take care of cross-sectional dependence. The research outputs reveal that institutional quality complements and stimulates the growth benefits of financial development in Southern African countries. It is further established that institutional quality has to persistently be above the threshold of 6.08 on the ordinal scale of 10 point before institution can strongly stimulate and complement financial development to impact positively on growth. This study, therefore, recommends that there is an urgent need for Southern African countries to strengthen and improve the quality of institutions so as to maximize the growth benefits of financial development.

关于金融影响经济增长的传播渠道的研究不断出现。有人认为，如果没有有效的机构，更多的融资可能不会产生更多的增长。同时，对撒哈拉以南非洲地区的研究很少。尽管该分区域的机构薄弱，但现有的研究都没有研究机构对南部非洲金融－增长关系的调节作用。与现有研究不同，本研究通过关注经济集团内国家之间的横断依存关系，为一般讨论做出了贡献。Driscoll和Kraay的非参数协方差矩阵估计器用于处理截面相关性。研究结果表明，机构质量补充并刺激了南部非洲国家金融发展的增长收益。进一步确定的是，在机构能够强烈刺激和补充金融发展以对增长产生积极影响之前，机构质量必须在10点的序数尺度上始终高于6.08的门槛。因此，这项研究建议，南部非洲国家迫切需要加强和改善机构的质量，以最大程度地提高金融发展的增长收益。