Expanding access to financial services holds the promise to help reduce poverty and foster economic development. However, little is still known about the determinants of the outreach of financial systems across countries. Our study is the first attempt to employ a large panel of countries, several indicators of financial inclusion and a comprehensive set of bank competition measures to study the role of banking system structure as a determinant of cross-country variability in financial outreach for households. We use panel data from 83 countries over a 10-year period to estimate models with both country and time fixed effects. We find that greater banking industry concentration is associated with more access to deposit accounts and loans, provided that the market power of banks is limited. We find evidence that countries in which regulations allow banks to engage in a broader scope of activities are also characterized by greater financial inclusion. Our results are robust to changes in sample, data, and estimation strategy and suggest that the degree of competition is an important aspect of inclusive financial sectors.

中文翻译：

---

银行集中度，竞争和金融包容性

扩大获得金融服务的机会有望帮助减少贫困和促进经济发展。但是，关于各国金融体系扩展的决定因素仍然知之甚少。我们的研究是首次尝试使用众多国家/地区，金融包容性的多个指标以及一套全面的银行竞争措施来研究银行体系结构在决定家庭金融服务中跨国可变性方面的作用。我们使用来自83个国家的10年期面板数据来估计具有国家和时间固定影响的模型。我们发现，如果银行的市场力量有限，那么银行业集中度越高，存款帐户和贷款的使用就越多。我们发现有证据表明，法规允许银行从事更大范围活动的国家也具有更大的金融包容性。我们的结果对于样本，数据和估计策略的变化具有鲁棒性，并表明竞争程度是包容性金融部门的重要方面。