Financial Inclusion, ICBT And The Role Of ICT In COMESA

Angella-Faith Lapukeni
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Angella Faith Montfaucon

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The unbanked are not financially inactive and neither do they consume all of their income. One of the reasons financial inclusion has become a policy priority is because of the negative macro-economic consequences of the informal sector, which includes an informal financial system and informal trade. Informal Cross Border Trade (ICBT) is prevalent in Africa and particularly in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region. This has negative impact on trade and other macro statistics for member economies and the region as a whole. Financial inclusion is a possible channel towards formalisation of these firms. The paper further discusses the role of developments in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in reaching out to the financially excluded. Trend analysis shows a strong correlation between developments in ICT and Intra-Regional Trade in COMESA. The paper is a preliminary, non-technical discussion.

Keywords: Financial Inclusion; Informal Cross Border Trade; Information and Communications Technology; COMESA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F19 G21 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-06-31, Revised 2015-09-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/75631/1/MPRA_paper_75631.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:75631

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().