The paper “Financial Inclusion and Women Economic Empowerment in Ghana” which won a Best Paper Award at the EMANES Conference 2022 has been published by the Emerging Markets Review Journal (September 2024). The paper has been co-authored by Barbara Ama Zelu, Susana Iranzo and Alejandro Perez-Laborda, Department of Economics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili and ECO-SOS, Spain. The authors had received 2,000 Euros of research budget in order to continue their research. The award was funded by the Euro-Mediterranean Economists Association – EMEA.
The paper uses a detailed national representative dataset of female household heads in Ghana to analyze the relation between access to formal and informal financial accounts and women’s economic empowerment. Using propensity score matching, The results elicit that women who have a financial account are more likely to be employed and tend to have higher income. The results are mainly driven by ownership of a formal account (i.e., in a commercial bank) while the impact of informal account ownership is not statistically significant. Thus the findings call for higher promotion of formal banking, particularly among women in rural and poorer areas where financial inclusion is lower.
Link to publication: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566014124000852
Emerging Markets Review aims to become the premier vehicle for publishing high impact empirical and theoretical studies in emerging markets finance. Preference is given to comparative studies that take global and regional perspectives, detailed single country studies that address critical policy issues and have significant global and regional implications, and papers that address the interactions of national and international financial architecture.
