The Non-Linear Relationship between Financial Access and Domestic Savings : The Case of Emerging Markets

This paper examines the impact of financial access on the accumulation of domestic savings in emerging markets (EMs) covering countries from Latin America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Asia as classified by the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) index. We use the System Generalized Method of Moments panel estimation methodology on annual data spanning the period 1980-2018. Principal component analysis allows us to create a financial access index as a linear combination of two variables measured per 100,000 adults: number of bank branches per and number of ATMs. The results of the paper reveal a statistically significant nonlinear relationship between the improvement in financial access measures and the accumulation of domestic savings with a definite threshold level. More specifically, our results for the full sample indicate that improvement in financial access may initially increase the savings rate leading to an increase in savings. Nevertheless, once the financial access index reaches its threshold level further improvement in financial access tends decrease households’ precautionary savings and to give rise to a decline in savings. Thus, the duality of the pattern highlights the non-linearity of financial access and domestic savings