در دسترس بودن خدمات مالی و نابرابری درآمد : شواهد به دست آمده از بسیاری از کشورها

Using a sample of developed and developing countries this study empirically gauges the impact of the availability of financial services, as measured by the number of bank branches per 100,000 populations on income inequality. The results show that greater access to bank branches robustly reduces income inequality across countries. The study also documents that barriers to bank access significantly increases income inequality.

While a voluminous extant literature has documented a strong link from financial development to economic growth, as summarized in Porta et al., 1997 and Levine, 1997, a relatively small group of recent studies have explored the important nexus between financial development and income inequality (Levine, 2007 and Beck et al., 2007; and Clark, Xu and Zou (2006)). All of these studies clearly document a statistically significant improvement in income inequality, as measured by a country's Gini coefficient and aggregate measure of financial development, typically proxied by some aggregate measure of financial development such as credit to the private sector by financial intermediaries, usually referred to as ‘private credit’. This has led to a growing policy consensus that financial development can benefit the poor (Rajan and Zingales, 2003, Levine, 2007 and Akhter and Daly, 2009). The importance of financial development in mitigating income inequality can be traced to the earlier theoretical works of Galor and Zeira, 1993 and Banerjee and Newman, 1993. Both set of papers show a negative relationship between financial sector development and income inequality in the face of lumpy investment and imperfections in the financial sector. However Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990) argue for a more complicated non-linear (inverted u-shaped) relationship between financial development and income inequality. They show that initially the rich benefit from financial development, but, over time as more people have access to the financial system income inequality declines.1 More recent work by Classens and Perotti (2007) and the World Bank (2007) provide a more detailed and nuanced discussion of the important embedded role of finance and specifically access to finance and its effects in mitigating income inequality in the process of development. Empirical evidence on the role of financial access in mitigating income inequality is however limited (World Bank, 2007). As a result, and unlike earlier studies, we employ a more micro focused measure as a proxy for financial development and access to financial services, which better captures how financial development potentially impacts income inequality. This measure is discussed in more detail in the next section. Based on the above discussion this paper attempts to empirically gauge the relationship between financial development and income inequality for a sample of developing and developed countries. Section 2 presents a short discussion of the extant theoretical and burgeoning empirical literature on the relationship between financial access and inequality. Section 3 discusses the data and the model(s) to be estimated. Section 4 contains a discussion of the empirical results. Finally, Section 5 contains some concluding remarks.

Based on the reported results this study concludes that there is robust support for the general idea that micro focused measures of financial development are good for the poor, in that it has a salutary effect on income distribution. Specifically we are able to document that greater access to bank branches and therefore banking services are good for the poor, however higher barriers to banking services, especially as measured by high minimums to open a checking/savings account is detrimental to income distribution. Our results were mixed with regard to the second proxy we employed to measure barriers to banking services—locations to submit Loan applications. To provide greater access to banks and their services especially in developing countries, policymakers should pursue policies that foster more competition in the banking sector, through greater deregulation and privatization ( Cull, 2001 and Hryckiewicz and Kowalewski, 2010).