Inequality, ICT and financial access in Africa

By Vanessa S. Tchamyou, G. Erreygers, Danny Cassimon. Technological forecasting & social change, 2019

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigates the role of information and communication technology (ICT) on income inequality through financial development dynamics of depth (money supply and liquid liabilities), efficiency (at banking and financial system levels), activity (from banking and financial system perspectives) and size, in 48 African countries for the period 1996 to 2014. The empirical evidence is based on Generalised Method of Moments. While both financial depth and size are established to reduce inequality contingent on ICT, only the effect of financial depth in reducing inequality is robust to the inclusion of time invariant variables to the set of strictly exogenous variables. We extend the analysis by decomposing financial depth into its components, namely: formal, informal, semi-formal and non-formal financial sectors. The findings based on this extension show that ICT reduces income inequality through formal financial sector development and financial sector formalization as opposed to informal financial sector development and financial sector informalization. The study contributes at the same time to the macroeconomic literature on measuring financial development and responds to the growing field of addressing post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) inequality challenges by means of ICT and financial access.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b10dad024ceffbdb9fa9e50a4b23d75bbb34393b

How researchers see this paper

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

In Economics and Econometrics

In Information Systems

In Management Information Systems

Citations in the corpus

Inequality and gender economic inclusion: The moderating role of financial access in Sub-Saharan Africa (2020, methodology): “On the one hand, the variables have been used in contemporary inclusive development literature (see Anyanwu, 2011; Meniago & Asongu, 2018; Asongu & Odhiambo, 2019c; Tchamyou, 2019, 2020).”
Education, lifelong learning, inequality and financial access: evidence from African countries (2020, methodology): “The three measurements have been used in recent literature for robustness purposes (Tchamyou et al., 2017).”
The Role of ICT in Modulating the Effect of Education and Lifelong Learning on Income Inequality and Economic Growth in Africa (2019, positive): “Consistent with the literature on ICT (Efobi et al., 2018; Tchamyou et al., 2019; Sassi & Goaied, 2013; Chavula, 2013), we proxy ICT measures with internet penetration rate per 100 people, mobile phone penetration rate per 100 people, and fixed broadband subscription per 100 people.”
Inequality, finance and renewable energy consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa (2021, neutral): “In this case, the correlation coefficient between the level and first difference series should be sufficiently high, notably, above 0.800, owing to the rule of thumb threshold documented in contemporary GMM-centric literature (Tchamyou, 2019a, 2020).”