Assessing the nexus between mobile financial service usage and inflation – evidence from Bangladesh

This paper set out to uncover the nexus between the propensity of mobile financial service (MFS) usage and inflation in Bangladesh, if any. This paper hypothesizes that the usage of MFS will lead to an increase in the velocity of money, i.e., the ease of using MFS in lieu of cash will lead to money transferring ownership quicker. All things constant, this will lead to inflation—as stipulated by the quantity theory of money. To this end, monthly data pertaining to the general price index, number of MFS agents, number of average daily MFS transactions, number of MFS clients and number of banks supporting MFS transactions have been used ranging from FY16 to FY20, subject to availability. The objective of the paper was to understand the relationship between usage of MFS and inflation, if any. To this end, two models were developed and subsequently tested. Upon undertaking a Johannsen co-integration test, it was found that there is indeed one long run equilibrium relationship between the variables used as per the second model. The use of the Vector Auto Regression (VAR) on model 1 failed to upholster the hypothesis of the paper. The subsequent use of a Vector-Error Correction model (VECM) on model 2 to capture the nexus between the propensity of MFS usage and inflation in Bangladesh also failed to diagnose a statistically significant relationship between MFS velocity and inflation in Bangladesh.