Financial inclusion: Policies and practices

Financial Inclusion: Concepts, Issues and Policies for India

This paper lays out some of the basic concepts surrounding financial inclusion, including access to banking, digital payments and financial literacy, as well as markets for health insurance, crop insurance, agricultural credit, small firm finance, and microcredit/ microfinance. It goes on to discuss various empirical and institutional studies of these dimensions of financial inclusion in the co...

Financial institutions in disadvantaged areas: a comparative analysis of policies encouraging financial inclusion in Britain and the United States

The paper compares British and US government policy initiatives to combat financial exclusion and promote community reinvestment. Financial exclusion, a general term for those who lack financial products, is concentrated in a small number of deprived urban areas in larger cities that are also starved of private sector investment. British policies, though they have drawn on US experience, predom...

Mobile money and financial inclusion in Mali: what has been the impact on saving practices?


The research project aimed to assess the potential of mobile banking in favour of financial inclusion in a context where access to formal finance is limited, and with particular consideration of its impact on users’ saving practices. Saving as a focus stems from the results of our previous work on microfinance in Mali (Sangare, 2013), which applied field research to highlight surveyed clients’ ...

Principles and policies for integration and inclusion

Banking Sector Policies and Financial Development: The Case of Iran

In this paper we empirically examine the effect of various banking policies on financial sector development. To this end, an econometric model in the context of Co-integrated VAR is employed. The results show that financial liberalization and reforms have a significant and positive effect on the banking sector development while inflation rate has a negative effect. Furthermore, the high GDP...