Impact of COVID-19 Movement Restrictions on Mobile Financing Services (MFSs) in Bangladesh

Autor: Sungida Rashid
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: FinTech, Vol 3, Iss 1, Pp 1-16 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2674-1032
DOI: 10.3390/fintech3010001
Popis: According to the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), Bangladesh aims to achieve a 100% financial inclusion target by 2026 through mobile financing services (MFSs). However, despite several efforts, the financial inclusion score remained only 53% at the end of 2021, compared to 50% in 2017. A substantial proportion of this growth came through MFSs during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article investigates the short-run and long-run influence of COVID-19 movement restriction orders on MFSs. An autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) is applied to the monthly transaction data over the period of December 2016 to May 2022 of the three most popular MFSs. Movement restriction orders are associated with a significant increase in person-to-person transactions (P2P) and person-to-business transactions (P2B) in the long run, but the effect is positive and statistically insignificant for remittance transfer. Furthermore, using the volume of ATM transactions as a measure of financial inclusion, this study confirms the crucial role of movement restriction orders in intensifying the financial inclusion of Bangladesh through MFSs. The coefficients of error correction models (ECM) indicate that policymakers must act promptly to develop actionable strategies to maintain the short run momentum of the demand for MFSs to achieve the national target.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals
Nepřihlášeným uživatelům se plný text nezobrazuje