Abstract
We establish for space-times obeying certain curvature conditions (consistent with gravity being attractive) some clear cut connections between global hyperbolicity and timelike geodesic completeness. We show, under suitable circumstances, that if the future of a spacelike hypersurface is future timelike geodesically complete then it is global hyperbolic. A partial converse is also obtained. One of our results is a consequence of a ⪡splitting theorem⪢ for space-times which admit a maximal hypersurface. Our main results are used to improve certain aspects of some splitting theorems previously obtained in the literature.