Financial inclusion and poverty: The case of Peru

Poverty is ostensibly a multi-dimensional issue. Economic, social and political forces play a role in its creation as well as in its eradication. Financial inclusion, understood as the provision of micro-loans to populations that have never before had access to lending, has for some time been considered a useful way to help reduce poverty. In this paper, we employ a panel data analysis based on a unique 2008-2010 database on financial inclusion in Peru. Exploiting the variation between departments, our regression results show that financial inclusion does have an alleviating effect on various indicators of poverty. However, coefficients are small and insignificant. Instead, the access to communication technology, such as the internet, plays a superior role in explaining poverty in Peru.