Financial Inclusion: New Measurement and Cross-Country Impact Assessment

Cyn-Young Park () and Rogelio Mercado

Working Papers from South East Asian Central Banks (SEACEN) Research and Training Centre

Abstract: This paper introduces a new index of financial inclusion for 151 economies using principal component analysis to compute weights for aggregating 9 indicators of access, availability, and usage. It then assesses the impact of financial inclusion on poverty and income inequality. The results provide evidence that high and middle-high-income economies with high financial inclusion have significantly lower poverty, while no such relation exists for middle-low and low-income economies. The nonlinearities in the cross-country determinants and impacts of financial inclusion on poverty and income inequality across income groups are important to choosing the appropriate policies for achieving inclusive growth in different development stages.

Keywords: financial inclusion; poverty; income inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G18 O11 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg, nep-fle and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.seacen.org/publications/RePEc/702002-100432-PDF.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Financial Inclusion: New Measurement and Cross-Country Impact Assessment (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:sea:wpaper:wp29

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from South East Asian Central Banks (SEACEN) Research and Training Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Azharin ().