Leveraging Financial Inclusion Through Technology-Enabled Services Innovation

The majority of the Indian population is not getting the advantages of inclusive growth and development in India, referred to as financial inclusion and has become a challenge for the Indian economy. The paper aims to investigate the use of available technology-enabled financial services and their role for financial inclusion in the current COVID 19 situation and the reaching rural and semi-urban India. The research is based on the in-depth analysis of the government policies and Fintech in the light of India's situation during COVID 19. The study reveals that the government showed the intent by opening a vast amount of banking accounts (411 million accounts) for financial inclusion in around six years. With radical changes in mobile subscribers and 4G, Internet, and Smartphone growth, India is close to achieving financial inclusion with full potential. However, significant change and development can be attained only if the government provides and motivates citizens to adopt the innovation services for financial inclusion.

Institutionalizing Inclusive Markets as a Prerequisite to Inclusive Growth

This article questions the contemporary definitions given to the concept of inclusive growth, which is assumed to be an effective solution to the problems of exclusion (marginalization, unemployment, poverty, inequality, etc.), without designing new growth models and without putting in place the tools necessary for inclusion (regulation, institutions, capacities, etc.). In the authors' view, the current exclusionary model is far from generating real inclusion as long as it fails to promote the necessary institutions to produce real inclusion and the ability to deal with the different forms of “exclusion.”

Inclusive Growth of Jambi Province

Objective - Strong economic growth is an accomplishment that is always awaited and targeted by a country or region. However, whether or not this economic growth has been in line with the reduction in poverty, the decrease in unemployed people, and the provision of many and quality jobs is still in question. Hence, the problem that needs to be investigated is whether the province of Jambi has been in inclusive economic growth and what factors are calculated and analysed for inclusion. Methodology - The method and data used are the adaptation of the main variables used by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the measure of the quality of economic growth is assessed from the IGI (Inclusive Growth Index). There is no previous research that scrutinized the Inclusive Growth of Jambi Province. Findings - The results show that IGI of Jambi Province has an increasing trend during the 2016 – 2020 period, although it is stagnant at a satisfactory level of progress. In relation to the level of satisfaction in 2019, it experienced growth compared to the previous year accompanied by an increase in several sub-dimensions such as the sub-dimension of productive workforce, economic infrastructure, poverty, health, education, sanitation and social protection. Meanwhile, the level of satisfaction with economic growth grew negatively, as well as the sub-dimensions of gender equality and constant income inequality. Type of Paper - Empirical Keywords: Economic Growth; IGI; Inclusive Economic; Jambi JEL Classification: O11, O4

Constituting A Root Map Towards Inclusive Growth: A Comparative Analysis

Developing and emerging countries of Asia have shown a tremendous improvement in economic growth rates couple with the significant strides in extreme poverty reduction. However, most of the economies are still facing some challenges like income and non-income disparities in sharing benefits and participation into social and economic activities. It requires attention that economic growth must be accompanied by reduction in poverty and income & non-income inequalities, and promoting equitable participation, i.e. growth must be inclusive. To address these challenges, present study presents a pioneer work to construct a unique but comprehensive inclusive growth index (IGI) over the period of last two decades for 17 Asian and 8 developed countries. The study made a comparative analysis of inclusive growth performances of developing and emerging countries of Asia and compared their final score with the benchmark set by developed countries of the world. The study highlighted the clusters of variables which required attention in developing Asia to converge with emerging Asia, and in emerging Asia to converge with developed world. In short, the study provides a root map for developing countries to merge with emerging countries, and for emerging countries to merge with developed countries.

Impact of tourism development on inclusive growth: A panel vector autoregression analysis for African economies

The persistent debate among policy makers and academics around combating the high rates of poverty and income inequality can be further illuminated by understanding how tourism contributes to inclusive growth, especially in developing economies. Tourism sector can be regarded as one of the key contributors to inclusive growth and where it has the capacity to generate prospects for productive employment. The goal of this article is thus to investigate the link between inclusive growth and tourism in the African context. To do this, we utilized a recent panel vector autoregression (pVAR) and data for 45 African countries spanning the period 1995 to 2019. Thus, by the error variance decomposition and impulse response functions, our results showed a weak positive effect of international tourism arrivals and the composite tourism indicator on inclusive growth, while tourism receipts and tourism expenditure insignificantly decreases inclusive growth in the sampled African economies. Our result is further supported by the panel system generalized method of moments (GMM). We provide some policy implications from our findings.