1. This includes respondents who report having a debit card.

2. According to the latest available data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database, there are 5.08 billion adults age 15 and above worldwide.

3. Exceptions include, for example, Italy (with an account penetration of 71 percent) and the United States (88 percent).

4. Reported _R-_ squared of a country-level ordinary least squares (OLS) regression of account penetration on the log of GDP per capita.

5. GDP per capita as shown for all economies in this section is in constant 2000 U.S. dollars.

6. Gallup’s regional-level statistics on population shares living on less than $2 a day are calculated using Gallup World Poll household data on monthly income, which is converted to international dollars using household consumption data from the World Bank’s International Comparison Program 2005 report (World Bank 2008b) adjusted for inflation relative to the United States. The regional averages are broadly consistent with the 2008 poverty line estimates from the World Bank’s Development Research Group (see http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/ index.htm?0,0). The two estimates are within 5 percentage points of each other for East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. For the Middle East and North Africa, Gallup’s regional estimate is 37 percentage points higher than the World Bank’s, though both estimates omit several populous countries in the region. For South Asia, Gallup’s estimate is 15 percentage points lower than the World Bank’s. The World Bank measures are based mostly on pre-2008 data and cover 127 economies. The 2005 World Bank estimates are discussed at length in Chen, Ravallion, and Sangraula (2010).

7. FDIC 2009.

8. Aterido, Beck, and Iacovone (2011) find no evidence of discrimination or lower inherent demand for financial services by women when key individual characteristics are taken into account.

9. Cole, Sampson, and Zia 2011.

10. The data on spending per student on primary education are from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database.

11. Gallup World Poll data include two variables related to the urban-rural divide: municipality population data that are used to stratify the sample, and interviewer-coded data on area size category. Municipality population data are not available for all regions because strata are sometimes based on geographic categories. The analysis in this report and the country-level data release are based on the interviewer-coded urban-rural data. The correlation between the population-based and interviewer-coded categorizations is very strong.

12. The positive but imperfect correlations of account use with financial depth and national income level raise questions about the drivers of cross-country differences in financial use and access that are explored in Allen and others (2012).

13. Among respondents, 12 percent chose none of the given reasons for not having an account.

14. Estimated increases are based on the percentage of adults who report not having a formal account for a given reason and thus by how many percentage points account penetration could increase if a given barrier was eliminated. For example, 31 percent of adults without an account in Sub-Saharan Africa cite distance as a barrier. Since the unbanked make up 76 percent of the Sub-Saharan Africa adult population, 23 percent of all Sub-Saharan African adults report not having an account in part because of distance (31*0.76 = 23). So, if distance barriers were alleviated, this segment of the population could become banked, thereby increasing the percentage of banked adults by 23 percentage points. Clearly these statements are indicative at best and should not be interpreted as causal.

**28**

MEASURING FINANCIAL INCLUSION