Digital Payments, the Cashless Economy, and Financial Inclusion in the United Arab Emirates: Why Is Everyone Still Transacting in Cash?

Jeremy Srouji ()
Additional contact information
Jeremy Srouji: GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur, ISS - International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Since the oil price downturn of 2015, the United Arab Emirates and fellow Gulf Cooperation Council countries have worked hard to expand digital payments in the interest of improved tax and revenue collection, transparency, and security. Yet despite a deep transformation and diversification of their payment ecosystems and the formalization of plans to become "cashless economies" modelled on South Korea and Sweden, cash continues to dominate payments in both countries. While industry players typically attribute the prevalence of cash in the region to questions of infrastructure readiness, transaction costs, and cyber-security, this paper finds that plans to expand digital payments at the expense of cash may not be well-adapted to countries with high levels of socioeconomic inequality. It proposes a link between socioeconomic inequality and use of cash in emerging economies, and concludes that it may be better to not view the relationship between cash and digital payments in binary zero-sum terms, until there is a better understanding of the socioeconomic , technological, and policy context in which countries like South Korea and Sweden have managed to reduce their reliance on cash in favor of a diversified digital payments ecosystem .

Keywords: digital payments; cashless economy; financial inclusion; complementary currencies; inequality; non-cash transactions; Gulf Cooperation Council; oil economies; remittances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cwa, nep-fle, nep-mon and nep-pay
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03015357
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published in Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 2020, Monetary Plurality and Crisis, 13 (11), ⟨10.3390/jrfm13110260⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03015357/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03015357

DOI: 10.3390/jrfm13110260

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().