The Roles of Insurance and Banking Services on Financial Inclusion

Insurance promotes financial resilience for individuals and households, aiding them in risk management and welfare improvement. Despite concerted efforts by countries and international bodies to promote financial inclusion through various programs, the roles of life and non-life insurance remain underemphasized as measure to close the financial gap in most countries. Our research is motivated by the realization that the existing literature lacks a unified measure of financial inclusion that considers the impact of life and non-life insurance. The objective of this study is to examine the roles of insurance and banking services in financial inclusion through an innovative measure. This study employs Principal Component Analysis to compute different sets of a multidimensional Financial Inclusion Index (FI index) that incorporate banking, life, and non-life insurance indicators for 72 countries from 2015 to 2019. When the role of life insurance is considered, some countries experience significant leaps in their financial inclusion levels, while the opposite holds true for most countries regardless of their developmental stage. In the meantime, non-life insurance has a strong positive impact on the overall financial inclusivity of the sample countries, with more than half of them recording higher financial inclusion. These results necessitate a reevaluation of financial inclusion strategies worldwide. We advocate for a more comprehensive approach that integrates insurance services into the financial system alongside traditional banking, especially non-life insurance given its significant contribution in enabling financial inclusion.