Mobile Money, Interoperability, and Financial Inclusion

Markus Brunnermeier, Nicola Limodio and Lorenzo Spadavecchia

No 31696, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper investigates the tradeoff between competition and financial inclusion resulting from the vertical integration between mobile network and money operators. Joining newly assembled data on mobile money fees through the WayBack machine, with sources on network coverage and financials, we examine the staggering across African operators and countries of platform interoperability – a policy that promotes transactions and competition across mobile money operators. Our results show that interoperability benefits users by lowering mobile money fees and their dispersion across operators. However, these positive effects are offset by a decrease in mobile towers and network coverage, especially in rural and poor districts, which, in turn, leads to a lower financial inclusion. We note that combining interoperability with subsidies for rural telecommunications delivers lower fees without hurting coverage.

JEL-codes: E4 O16 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-fle, nep-mfd, nep-mon, nep-pay and nep-reg
Note: DEV IO ME
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31696.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Mobile Money, Interoperability and Financial Inclusion (2023)
Working Paper: Mobile Money, Interoperability and Financial Inclusion (2023)
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:nbr:nberwo:31696

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31696
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).