Search results

This paper examines the impact of financial inclusion on poverty through access to mobile money in developing economies.

The authors employ the principal component analysis to construct an index of financial inclusion using demand and supply indicators, including mobile accounts. The authors use the two-step system GMM estimator for the analysis because of its efficiency and robustness in addressing heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

The main finding is that financial inclusion generally increased and significantly reduces poverty in the sample period. Furthermore, income inequality worsens poverty.

This study has few limitations. First, the empirical analysis of the study is restricted to macroeconomic factors only because of limited Household Finance Survey data set and time availability. Second, the study is limited to developing countries and the results cannot be generalized.

Financial inclusion is a significant policy tool for poverty reduction. There is the need to enhance strategies that further improve financial inclusion by expanding and improving the use of mobile money accounts.

The paper sheds light on how developing countries can harness financial inclusion to reduce poverty.

The paper differs from the previous studies in two ways. Firstly, mobile money account is included in the computation of financial inclusion index over the sample period. It also determines the impact of financial inclusion on poverty for short-run and long-run periods.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2021-0690

The study aims to seeks to ascertain the impact of corporate disclosure on foreign equity ownership. Corporate disclosures are important to for stock markets because it is an activity that mitigates information differences between company insiders and outsiders.

Corporate disclosures assume an even greater important when company outsiders are not domiciled in the same country as the company and the company insiders. In this study, the relation between foreign share ownership and corporate disclosures using data on Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria is examined.

The consistent results in this study are that foreign share ownership is positively related to firm size. A negative relation, however, between foreign share ownership and corporate disclosure is found, but this turns out to be related to disclosures about ownership, while disclosures on financial reporting and board management have a positive and insignificant statistical relation taking into account unobserved country, time and firm effects. Further analysis shows that corporate disclosures are very persistent and negatively related to lag foreign share ownership. No consistent statistical relation is found between disclosure and market-to-book values as a proxy for investment opportunities. It is recommended to African-listed firms to pursue adoption of high-quality financial reporting standards and to increase their reporting on board management. The study also recommends that the African Government weighs the benefits of detailed ownership disclosures.

The study utilises frontier market data to complement existing literature on how corporate disclosure and transparency influences foreign investors decision to invest in Africa.