Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/239318 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Risk and Financial Management [ISSN:] 1911-8074 [Volume:] 13 [Issue:] 10 [Publisher:] MDPI [Place:] Basel [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 1-28
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
The objective of the study was to enhance our knowledge on institutional bottlenecks for financial development, financial inclusion, and microfinance, using Mauritania as a case study. We used a mixed-methods' methodology that combines analysis of secondary data and an expert interview. First, a logit model with dummy independent variables was used to investigate the factors that impact the households' access to credit, the main advantage of this model being to avoid confounding effects by analyzing the association of all variables together. Our study found that access to financial services is equal in Mauritania between men and women, but that access to credit is higher for public sector employees, educated people, and households with smaller families. Second, using principal components' analysis, we found that the different regions of Mauritania can be divided based on unemployment, income, literacy, financial inclusion, and population density into two main dimensions, yielding four quadrants: Attractive, industrious, moderate, and resource cursed. We expected that sparsely populated countries would have less access to credit. Counterintuitively, we found that within a low-density country, people in the lowest-density regions have higher odds of getting credit. Third, based on an interview with an expert, we noted the key challenges that microfinance is facing in Mauritania and provided recommendations to overcome these. As in most case studies, external validity was limited.
Subjects: 
financial inclusion
population density
logit model
microcredit
microfinance
regional analysis
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.