The Efficiency of Financial Inclusion: Evidence from the Global Findex Database

Abstract

. Financial inclusion is one of the main policy tools to increase welfare, reduce poverty and enhance macroeconomic stability which creates different opportunities and challenges for both developing and developed countries. More than two billion people in the world that are not financially included, and the World Bank has committed to helping them gain access to financial services by 2020. This has made it necessary for policy makers to be prepared for these regulations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is estimate efficiency of financial inclusions for countries around the world by using non-parametric techniques. The results show that there are 9 countries efficient for maximizing their financial inclusion; while 128 countries are inefficient. Moreover, the paper calculates relative efficiency scores and potential recovery rates of countries in order to help policymakers about how to change macro-economic variables so that financial inclusion becomes efficient.