Financial Inclusion and Legal Discrimination Against Women: Evidence from Developing Countries

By Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, L. Klapper, Dorothe Singer. 2013

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper documents and analyzes gender differences in the use of financial services using individual-level data from 98 developing countries. The data, drawn from the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, highlight the existence of significant gender gaps in ownership of accounts and usage of savings and credit products. Even after controlling for a host of individual characteristics including income, education, employment status, rural residency and age, gender remains significantly related to usage of financial services. This study also finds that legal discrimination against women and gender norms may explain some of the cross-country variation in access to finance for women. The analysis finds that in countries where women face legal restrictions in their ability to work, head a household, choose where to live, and receive inheritance, women are less likely to own an account, relative to men, as well as to save and borrow. The results also confirm that manifestations of gender norms, such as the level of violence against women and the incidence of early marriage for women, contribute to explaining the variation in the use of financial services between men and women, after controlling for other individual and country characteristics.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87ebea89942af4bcd7022fc884036ce309335946

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

In Economics and Econometrics

In Gender Studies

Citations in the corpus

Theories of Financial Inclusion (2020, background): “…of financial inclusion (Bhandari, 2018), others think that women are the beneficiaries of financial inclusion outcomes (Ghosh and Vinod, 2017; Demirguc-Kunt et al, 2013b; Swamy, 2014) while some think that the economy and the financial system are beneficiaries of financial inclusion…”
Bridging the financial inclusion gender gap in smallholder agriculture in Nigeria: An untapped potential for sustainable development (2020, result): “This confirms the findings of Demirguc-kunt et al. (2013) that in countries with female restrictions on household headship, jobs, mobility, or asset ownership, women have a lower likelihood to have an account, borrow or save in a formal financial institution.”
ACHIEVING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (2016, background): “Women also are more likely than men to be self-employed in developing countries and thus are in greater need of access to formal financial services (Demirguc-Kunt, Klapper, and Singer 2013).”
Decentralized Environmental Regulations and Plant-Level Productivity (2015, positive): “But the data show that poor people do make financial transactions, and research has shown that even the very poor save when they are provided with a savings mechanism (Dupas and Robinson 2013b). This underlines the importance of providing basic low-cost accounts. 8. Allen and others (2012) show that”
Financial Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa: Recent Trends and Determinants (2018, background): “Similar evidence showing that women have lower levels of inclusion is documented by Demirgüç-Kunt et al. (2013), Allen et al. (2016) andMohammed et al. (2017).”
Is financial inclusion good for bank stability? International evidence (2017, methodology): “…papers assess the effect of financial inclusion on various socio-economic indicators (e.g., Butler and Cornaggia, 2011; Allen et al., 2013; Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2013a; Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2013b), or use disaggregated single indicator of financial inclusion (e.g., BDM, 2007), this paper…”
Financial Inclusion, Financial Literacy and Economically Vulnerable Populations in the Middle East and North Africa (2019, positive): “…as sociocultural norms still result in economic disparities that prevent vulnerable populations from accessing important financial resources such as property and credit (Coury and Rashid 2015; D’Espallier, Guérin, and Mersland 2011; Demirgüç-Kunt, Klapper, and Singer 2013; Elder and Kring 2016).”
Measuring financial inclusion: a composite FI index for the developing countries (2020, methodology): “And one of the indicators commonly used in recent studies to measure FI (e.g. Demirguc-Kunt et al., 2013; Allen et al., 2014) is the percentage of adults who have an account at a bank or another type of financial institution.”