Reaching out: access to and use of banking services across countries

This paper (i) presents new indicators of banking sector penetration across 99 countries, based on a survey of bank regulatory authorities, (ii) shows that these indicators predict household and firm use of banking services, (iii) explores the association between the outreach indicators and measures of financial, institutional, and infrastructure development across countries, and (iv) relates these banking outreach indicators to measures of firms’ financing constraints. In particular, the authors find that greater outreach is correlated with standard measures of financial development, as well as with economic activity.