The Journal of Accounting and Management, Vol 9, No 2 (2019)

Abstract

 Financial inclusion has become an important policy issue because of its relevance in determining economic growth and development. Financial inclusion has been recognised as a fundamental driver that could aid in achieving seven out of the seventeen outlined sustainable development goals. The paper employs affordability of financial services as a surrogate measure for financial inclusion as the dependent variable of the study and ease of access to loans and soundness of banks as the independent variables. In order to cater for other factors that have been argued to influence financial inclusion in an economy, the study controlled for gross domestic product per capita, foreign direct investment inflows and inflation. Dynamic panel data with GMM estimation techniques was used. In order to test the sensitivity of our results to other estimation techniques, panel data fixed effect (FE) and the pooled OLS estimators were employed. The results of the FE and the pooled OLS estimations mostly authenticate that of the GMM estimator. That is to say that the results are robust to other estimation techniques.