Measurement and spillover effect of digital financial inclusion: a cross-country analysis

Measures of national financial inclusion mostly focus on traditional financial services and ignore the role of digital finance. We incorporate several digital elements of financial inclusion and construct a comprehensive index of digital financial inclusion for 101 countries in 2017. The spatial distribution of the index shows a strong geographical aggregation and a clustered pattern in national income groups. Regions with higher-income countries tend to have better digital financial inclusion. However, digital technology has helped several low-income countries to improve their financial inclusion. But this improvement does not spillover to other low-income countries in the region.