Measuring Financial Inclusion in the Main Euro Area Countries : The Role of Electronic Cards

Since financial inclusion has become a policy target in many countries, it is crucial to measure it properly. The usual indexes of financial inclusion include inappropriate variables and do not take into account other relevant aspects, thus misrepresenting the phenomenon. In this paper, we focus on the distribution of electronic cards, generally not included in the usual indexes of financial inclusion even if they provide alternatives to usual saving practices and make transactions across larger markets and wider geographic areas less costly. We show that if we also take account of these instruments, the comparative valuation of the degree of financial inclusion across the main euro-area countries changes substantially. We also employ survey data to analyse cross-country differences in the degree of financial inclusion and the distribution of multidimensional deprivations of specific sub-groups of populations