Financial inclusion in West African Economic and Monetary Union's economies: Performance analysis using data envelopment analysis

A data envelopment analysis (DEA) has yet to be chosen to assess countries' financial inclusion levels. We introduce an application of the DEA methodology to compute aggregate performance measures regarding the financial inclusion of economies. We specifically explore composite scores based on relative efficiency, super-efficiency, and cross-efficiency approaches. We implement the proposed procedure to study the financial inclusion in nations from the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). We use the Union's Central Bank's financial inclusion data from 2010 to 2017. We obtain robust financial inclusion level measures, showing that overall, in the Union, there have been steady improvements during the study period, but with heterogenous behavior at the level of each economy. A benchmarking analysis allowed us to determine the countries with the best practices. For the remaining nations, we find their reference countries. Finally, we identified which financial service sectors drive the financial inclusion in each country from the optimal weights of the DEA model.