Abstract:
Mobile money has transformed the landscape of financial inclusion in developing and emerging market countries, leapfrogging the provision of formal banking services. This column explains how mobile money potentially helps ameliorate several areas of market failure in developing economies, including saving, insurance, and the empowerment of women. It illustrates these effects using examples from a burgeoning empirical literature and concludes that the system-wide effects of mobile money may be even greater than current studies suggest.
Citation:
Aron, J. & Muellbauer J. (2019). The economics of mobile money: Harnessing the transformative power of technology to benefit the global poor, VoxEu.