Financial Inclusion and Economic Growth in Tunisia: An ARDL Bound Test Approach

This paper investigates the nexus between financial inclusion and economic growth in Tunisia. It uses three dimensions of financial inclusion; the first is the access to financial services, the second is the availability of financial services, and the third is the usage of the financial services, while GDP per capita is used as a proxy for economic growth. The paper finds a low level of financial inclusion index in Tunisia by using the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) for cointegration. The paper finds a negative relationship between the majority of financial inclusion indicators and economic growth during the period 2005-2017. This fact emphasizes that more efforts need to be done to enhance and extend financial inclusion in Tunisia through financial literacy, costumers protection, providing financial services to rural areas, and engagement of low-income people in formal financial services, especially via the informal sector.