Legal and economic determinants of women’s legal access to formal finance: evidence from South Asia

Despite decades of legal reform, women in South Asia continue to face barriers to legal access to formal finance. Using pooled country–year logistic regression for eight South Asian countries (1970–2022), this study examines how statutory legal rights and economic conditions shape women’s legal capacity to open a bank account on equal terms with men, measured as legal access rather than ownership. Stronger autonomy protections, particularly in parenthood, mobility, and assets, are associated with higher probabilities of equal access. A one-point increase in parenthood protections raises predicted access by about 0.4 percentage points. Log GDP per capita is negatively associated with access in the preferred specification (β = –1.920, p < 0.01), though its marginal effect is smaller than that of autonomy-related legal domains. These findings suggest that legal autonomy, especially in mobility, assets, and parenthood, matters more than income growth for women’s legal access to formal finance in South Asia.