This paper examines the effects of macroeconomic policy and regulatory environment on mobile money usage. Specifically, we develop an autoregressive distributed lag model to investigate the effect of key macroeconomic variables and mobile money tax on mobile money usage in Uganda. Using monthly...

Kenya is about to embark on an important reform to expand banking to millions of poor households by enabling third-party retail agents as a low-cost distribution alternative to branches. However, this initiative risks being undermined by the mobile network operator (MNO) Safaricom, which...

There are increasingly many digital alternatives to physical cash as basic means of payment, many of these offered by non-financial private sector actors. While such a trend towards a cashless society brings the convenience of digital payments to users and can encourage innovation in financial...

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) promise many benefits but, if not well designed, they could have undesired consequences, including for monetary policy. Issuing an unremunerated CBDC or a wholesale CBDC does not change the objectives of monetary policy or the operational framework for...

This paper investigates the factors that support a funding demand increase in regional economies under easing monetary conditions. The following results were empirically obtained on the basis of individual firms and the 47 regional data in the 2000s in Japan. The first result is that funding...