The impact of financial inclusion on rural food security experience: A perspective from low-and middle-income countries

Renata Baborska, Emilio Hernandez-Hernandez, Emiliano Magrini () and Cristian Morales-Opazo ()
Additional contact information
Cristian Morales-Opazo: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations

Review of Development Finance Journal, 2020, vol. 10, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: The paper analyses the impact of using single, combinations and the range of three different formal financial services – savings, credit and payments – on the personal food security experience in rural areas across 88 low-and middle-income countries. It takes advantage of Global Findex database and Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) – both included in the 2014-round of Gallup World Poll that collects data at individual-level and comparable worldwide. Our outcome variable of interest is the individual’s probability of experiencing food insecurity related to difficulties in access to food, measured through FIES. Econometrically, we employ different non-experimental impact evaluation methods: entropy balancing, propensity scores matching and fully interacting linear matching in order to ensure the consistency of our results. We find mixed food security effects depending on the type of service used. Use of savings accounts significantly decreases, use of credit significantly increases and use of formal payment services has no effect on the individual’s probability of experiencing food insecurity. This is consistent with the view that the specific features, rather than the range, of services offered by formal financial sector are the key determinants of their impact on household welfare, thus emphasizing the need to capture more contextual variables in future impact studies to understand not only the size of the impact but how this impact is shaped.

Keywords: Financial inclusion; experience-based food insecurity scale; rural populations; low-and middle-income countries; impact; entropy balancing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D14 G21 O17 Q18 R51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.co.za/doi/10.10520/ejc-rdfin-v10-n2-a1 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The impact of financial inclusion on rural food security experience: a perspective from low-and middle-income countries (2018)
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:afj:journ3:v:10:y:2020:i:2:p:1-18

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Development Finance Journal from Chartered Institute of Development Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk De Doncker ().