Digital Financial Inclusion, Banking Accessibility, and Economic Resilience: A Real-Time Multi-Country Analysis Using IMF Financial Access Survey Data

Abstract

Financial inclusion has been identified as one of the drivers of sustainable economic development, especially in the era of digital transformation. The use of digital financial services, mobile banking platforms, and electronic payment methods has enriched access to formal financial services globally. However, there remains significant variation in financial access and banking services between countries, which is needed for inclusive growth and economic resilience.  This study examines the relationship between digital financial inclusion, banking availability, and economic resilience using data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Financial Access Survey (FAS).The analysis uses a real time multi-country approach to assess the role of financial infrastructure indicators for economic stability and resilience. Financial inclusion measures in the study are based on: commercial bank branch density, the density of automated teller machines (ATM), the percentage of deposit accounts, the percentage of loan accounts, the percentage of people using digital payments, and the percentage of mobile banking users. A thorough data preprocessing approach was taken, which consisted of missing value processing, normalization, aggregation at country level, and outlier detection. The relationships between the study variables were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multiple linear regression. Moreover, the ability of advanced machine learning models like Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost and Support Vector Regression (SVR) was assessed for the purposes of the predictive performance and to find the best method for modelling economic resilience. . The empirical results show that the digital financial inclusion, banking accessibility and economic resilience have positive significant relationship. The financial stability and credit availability along with banks' resilience to economic shocks are shown to be higher among the economies with higher levels of digital financial services adoption and stronger banks infrastructure, according to the results of correlation and regression analysis. XGBoost was found to be the best performing predictive model among evaluated models, which has great potential in capturing the complex relationship in the financial inclusion data. The results underscore the critical need for increasing the scale of digital financial ecosystems, improving financial banking outreach and financial literacy to ensure sustainable economic development. This study adds to the expanding literature on financial inclusion and offers key policy guidance for policy makers, financial institutions, and development organizations to create more resilient and inclusive financial systems.