Financial Inclusion: New Measurement and Cross-Country Impact Assessment
Published By: Asian Development Bank | Published Date: March , 2018This paper introduces a new index of financial inclusion for 151 economies using principal component
analysis to compute weights for aggregating nine 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.
Author(s): Rogelio V. Mercado, Jr., Cyn-Young Park | Posted on: Mar 20, 2018 | Views()