Determinants of financial inclusions: comparing high, middle, and low-income countries

The objective of this paper is to examine the determinants of financial inclusion in high, middle, and low-income countries. We use the World Bank's 2017 Global Financial Inclusion database and apply probit estimation for different measures of financial inclusion, including account, payment, saving, and borrowing. For the full sample, we find that being a man, more educated, richer, employed, and older to a certain age increases the likelihood of access to formal financial services. For the three country sub-groups, the impacts of education and income on the likelihood of saving and borrowing formally are highest in high-income countries and lowest in low-income countries but the ranking is reverted for formal account and payment. However, the magnitude of impacts increases with the level of education and income in each of country sub-groups for all measures formal financial inclusion. Our finding supports the view that substitution between formal and informal credit is based on income level in high-income and middle-income countries only.