Financial awareness: a bridge to financial inclusion

ABSTRACT

Financial inclusion, which means access to formal financial services for the whole population is India's important policy objective. In this paper, we examine the association between financial awareness and financial inclusion. Using statistical association tests on the primary data, collected from 200 respondents in Nalgonda and Medak districts in Telangana, India, we find that financial awareness is significantly associated with financial inclusion. Regression analysis shows that more financial awareness is associated with a higher level of financial inclusion. We also observe that factors, including being female and having a lower level of education and income, are related to lower financial inclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial awareness
• financial inclusion
• India
• primary data
• regression
• Telangana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ICSSR and MHRD under IMPRESS scheme grant IMPRESS/P3893/232/2018-19/ICSSR

Notes on contributors

Rishi Kumar

Dr Rishi Kumar is a faculty at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus in the Department of Economics and Finance. His research interests include development economics, applied econometrics, and time series analysis.

D. C. Pathak

Dr D. C. Pathak is a faculty at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus in the Department of Economics and Finance. His research interests include development economics, applied microeconometrics, applied microeconomics and game theory, and microfinance.