This paper discusses Islamic banking products and interprets them in the context of financial intermediation theory …

barriers to banking and show that in many countries these barriers can potentially exclude a significant share of the … population from using banking services. Correlations with bank- and country-level variables show that bank size and the … lower barriers. Finally, though foreign banks seem to charge higher fees than other banks, in foreign dominated banking …

"The authors (1) present new indicators of banking sector penetration across 99 countries based on a survey of bank … regulatory authorities, (2) show that these indicators predict household and firm use of banking services, (3) explore the … countries, and (4) relate these banking outreach indicators to measures of firms' financing constraints. In particular, they …