Hypothesizing resurgence of financial inclusion to reduce poverty in Afghanistan

Abstract

Reducing poverty is a critical topic of policy discussion across the world. Developing countries and post-conflict environments commonly face poverty growth. At present, Afghanistan is experiencing the highest rate of poverty in the world; only one tenth of the Afghan population has access to financial services that are mostly localized within the capital and regional cities. In this paper I hypothesize financial inclusion as a contextualized model that can significantly reduce the rate of poverty. I use a set of timeseries data on financial inclusion determinants excluding insurance as the explanatory variables and linearly regress them on the rate of poverty from 2004 to 2018. The statistical results reveal that ATMs per 100,000 adults in the country significantly reduce poverty by 0.25% by increasing capital mobility and remittances. Credit cards and borrowing facilities to the informal economy have significant coefficients of 0.00635% and 0.0207% respectively on poverty reduction as an emergent strategy. The security variable has a significant coefficient of 41% reduction of poverty. Among all other variables tested, extending mobile money facilities is also significant and reduces poverty by 0.015%.