Read more
Experts report on the latest research on extending access to financial services to the 2.5 billion adults around the world who lack it.
List of contents
1 Introduction: Banking the World 1
Robert Cull, Asl ı Demirg ü ç -Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch
I Where Are We Now? 17
2 Half the World Is Unbanked 19
Alberto Chaia, Aparna Dalal, Tony Goland,
Maria Jose Gonzalez, Jonathan Morduch, and Robert Schiff
II Better Data 43
3 Cause and Effect of Financial Access: Cross-Country
Evidence from the FinScope Surveys 45
Patrick Honohan and Michael King
4 How to Ask Households about Financial Services:
Experimental Evidence from Ghana and Timor-Leste 85
Robert Cull and Kinnon Scott
5 Going with the Flow: Measuring Financial Usage in Poor
Households 109
Daryl Collins
III Creating Impact 135
6 The Economic Impact of Expanding Access to Finance in
Mexico 137
Miriam Bruhn and Inessa Love
7 Finance and Hunger: Empirical Evidence of the Agricultural
Productivity Channel 157
Stijn Claessens and Erik Feijen
vi Contents
8 Entrepreneurial Finance in the Western Balkans:
Characteristics of the Newly Self-Employed in Albania,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia 211
Asl ı Demirg ü ç -Kunt, Leora F. Klapper, and Georgios A. Panos
IV Cautionary Tales 265
9 The Impact of International Remittances on Income, Work
Efforts, Poverty, and Inequality: Evidence from Vietnam
Household Living Standard Surveys 267
Nguyen Viet Cuong, Marrit van den Berg, and Robert Lensink
10 Mortgage Finance in Central and Eastern Europe —
Opportunity or Burden? 305
Thorsten Beck, Katie Kibuuka, and Erwin R. Tiongson
V More than Products 391
11 Measuring Personality Traits and Predicting Loan Default
with Experiments and Surveys 393
Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Omar Robles
12 Valuing Financial Literacy 415
Shawn Cole, Thomas Sampson, and Bilal Zia
13 Use of Biometric Technology in Developing Countries 429
Xavier Gin é , Jessica Goldberg, Shalini Sankaranarayanan,
Peter Sheerin, and Dean Yang
14 Accessing Credit from Banks, Microfinance Institutions, and
Informal Groups: What Is the Role of Social Capital? 447
Anni Heikkil ä , Panu Kalmi, and Olli-Pekka Ruuskanen
VI Conclusion 467
15 Ten Research Questions 469
Jonathan Morduch
Contributors 483
Index 485
About the author
edited by Robert Cull, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch
Summary
Experts report on the latest research on extending access to financial services to the 2.5 billion adults around the world who lack it.
About 2.5 billion adults, just over half the world's adult population, lack bank accounts. If we are to realize the goal of extending banking and other financial services to this vast “unbanked” population, we need to consider not only such product innovations as microfinance and mobile banking but also issues of data accuracy, impact assessment, risk mitigation, technology adaptation, financial literacy, and local context. In Banking the World, experts take up these topics, reporting on new research that will guide both policy makers and scholars in a broader push to extend financial markets.
The contributors consider such topics as the complexity of surveying people about their use of financial services; evidence of the impact of financial services on income; the occasional negative effects of financial services on poor households, including disincentives to work and overindebtedness; and tools for improving access such as nontraditional credit scores, financial incentives for banking, and identification technologies that can dramatically reduce loan default rates.
