Financial Inclusion - A Comparative Study on South Asia
Financial Inclusion - A Comparative Study on South Asia

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to construct an index of financial inclusion (IFI) in South Asian countries. Despite the growing recognition of financial inclusion across countries, the literature on measuring financial inclusion position among the South Asian countries is still scanty. Initially, the index of financial inclusion is calculated for 6 countries of the South Asian Countries for 2004 to 2015 using the data provided by financial access survey of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Global findex database and finally Sarma model (2008) to compute Index of Financial Inclusion (IFI). Sarma model (2008) includes three dimensions of financial inclusion, which are: banking penetration, availability of banking services and usage of banking system. This paper reflects the comparative position of financial inclusion among the countries in the South Asia. From the index calculated, it is noticed that the position of India and Bhutan are good in comparison on other countries in South Asia but the Pakistan and Afghanistan are lag behind in financial inclusion due to lacks of usages of formal financial services by their country people. So, there are lots of scopes for improvement of financial inclusion position of these countries massively.

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