Reaching out : access to and use of banking services across countries

By Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, María Soledad Martínez Pería. 2005

1,197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors (1) present new indicators of banking sector penetration across 99 countries based on a survey of bank regulatory authorities, (2) show that these indicators predict household and firm use of banking services, (3) explore the association between the outreach indicators and measures of financial, institutional, and infrastructure development across countries, and (4) relate these banking outreach indicators to measures of firms' financing constraints. In particular, they find that greater outreach is correlated with standard measures of financial development, as well as with economic activity. Controlling for these factors, the authors find that better communication and transport infrastructure and better governance are also associated with greater outreach. Government ownership of financial institutions translates into lower access, while more concentrated banking systems are associated with greater outreach. Finally, firms in countries with higher branch and ATM penetration and higher use of loan services report lower financing obstacles, thus linking banking sector outreach to the alleviation of firms' financing constraints.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea660bf776225428e079b884df2a35a5a11c4b9d

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Citations in the corpus

Factors that Matter for Financial Inclusion: Evidence from Peru (2015, neutral): “3: Most of the existing studies to date are mainly based on macroeconomic data (Patrick, 1996; Beck, et al. 2007; Honohan, 2008; Kendall, Mylenko and Ponce, 2010).”
Media Ownership, Concentration and Corruption in Bank Lending (2011, positive): “This treatment has been shown to be important in deriving robust and reliable results (Beck et al. 2007).”
The Impact of Financial Inclusion on Economic Growth, Poverty, Income Inequality, and Financial Stability in Asia (2020, background): “Financial inclusion can lift the financial condition and standard of living of poor and reduce income inequality (Beck et al, 2007).”
A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis of Financial Inclusion and Economic Growth (2013, background): “The modern economic and social development agenda is based on the broad access to financial services, across the world, mainly for two reasons (Beck and Torre, 2006): (i) a large theoretical and empirical literature showing the importance of a well-developed financial system for economic development”
Disasters and Development: Natural Disasters, Credit Constraints and Economic Growth (2014, background): “Our credit measure is highly correlated with the Beck et al. (2007) data and”
Mobile Banking: The Impact of M-Pesa in Kenya (2011, methodology): “Using data ranging between 2001 and 2005, Beck et al. (2007) show that African countries lagged in financial access.”