A regional Kohonen map of financial inclusion and related macroeconomic variables

Abstract

Financial inclusion increases savings, promotes investment and the expansion of the domestic market, and consequently favors economic growth. In this work, the evolution of a set of indicators of financial inclusion is analyzed simultaneously with a group of macroeconomic variables. The methodology applied is a particular type of neural network, called Self Organizing Maps (SOM). The data is for the years 2011, 2014 and 2017 including data from 37 countries belonging to three great regions: Latin America, Europe and Asia. The results show that there are five groups of countries with similar characteristics of financial inclusion and macroeconomic indicators, nonetheless, there are countries that move through different groups over the years studied. Also, there is evidence that the macroeconomic variables are related with the levels of financial inclusion; those countries with great GDP per capita, higher education and employment, present better levels of financial inclusion.