| Abstract: |
This paper examines the effect of financial development in the Fintech age,
measured by broad money, domestic credit, and mobile money, on poverty and
human development in the Southeast Asian economies. Using unbalanced
longitudinal dataset (1990-2017), the findings suggest that broad money and
domestic credit contribute to poverty reduction and promote human development.
The role of mobile money is seen to have a statistically positive impact only
if we analyse it with human development. Additionally, when we take a closer
look at the different stage of economic, political and institutional
development in this region, we found that the positive effect of broad money
and domestic credit is mostly found only in the less developed and less
democratic countries. The mobile money, on the other hand, is found to
statistically promote the human development in both groups of countries, but
there is no statistical relationship for poverty analysis. To avoid the
endogeneity bias driven by the fact that the variables in the analysis are not
exogenous, the paper uses the instrumental variables and two-stage least
squares for panel-data estimations, taking from the economic literature on the
role of financial development in developing countries. In doing so, along with
additional statistical tests of subsample analysis of political and
institutional factors and higher- and lower-income countries, the results
confirm the robustness in the analysis. |