Since financial inclusion has become a policy target in many countries, it is crucial to measure it properly. The usual indexes of financial inclusion include inappropriate variables and do not take into account other relevant aspects, thus misrepresenting the phenomenon. In this paper, we focus on the distribution of electronic cards, generally not included in the usual indexes of financial inclusion even if they provide alternatives to usual saving practices and make transactions across larger markets and wider geographic areas less costly.
We show that if we also take account of electronic cards, the comparative valuation of the degree of financial inclusion across the main euro-area countries changes substantially. Germany is the country with the best performance in terms of financial inclusion over the whole sample period, while Italy, the country with the worst performance in 2007, shows considerable development, overtaking Spain and equalling France in 2016.
Published in 2020 in: Social Indicators Research, v. 148, 3, pp. 765-786
