The individual determinants of Financial Inclusion in Morocco: An Exploratory Study in the case of a credit application

Abstract

This work aims to study the microeconomic factors that influence financial inclusion in Morocco. It is an empirical illustration, in which, we try to highlight the financial inclusion of households and to know if Morocco is an under-banked country through a detailed tracing of the profile of household credit applicants. To achieve this goal, we will adopt the deductive approach. This method consists in constructing from the existing theoretical and empirical answers on the phenomena and confronting them with the reality of the field by using an empirical investigation. Drawing on the previous studies conducted on the same issue, in particular, the work of Honohan, P., and King, M. (2009), Clamara, N. et al. (2014), Tuesta D. et al. (2015) or Demirguç- Kunt et al. (2018), we will assume that the decision to take credit is strongly related to the observable characteristics of the individual. Thus, the results of our study corroborate those obtained from previous empirical work. Indeed, we find from the adopted model that financial inclusion in Morocco, as the case in emerging economies, remains highly correlated with the income (approached by the social class variable) and the educational level of the individual and less related to gender and age. In this respect, the more the person's level increases the more the probability of being included financially increases, but not necessarily with the same proportion. However, despite the efforts made to reduce the causes of financial exclusion, access to finance remains the major challenge of economic agents. This limit of access could be explained, on the one hand, due to the lack of guarantees, which do not allow indigent people to subscribe a credit with the banking institutions, and on the other hand, among these, some refuse to resort to this mode of financing since they do not coincide with their ethical convictions.