The Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics (IFC) and Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) are co-sponsoring a workshop on Financial Inclusion Indicators in Kuala Lumpur on 5 6 November 2012. The programme for this important event is attached.
Financial inclusion has emerged as an important topic on the global agenda for sustainable long-term economic growth. The issue attracts increasing interest from the central banking community in developing, emerging and developed countries across a broad range of regions. In addition to central banks’ own initiatives in promoting financial inclusion, there are also global groups and institutions such as the G20, the International Finance Corporation, the IMF, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor that have assumed an increasingly active role at the international level in developing new research, setting standards and promoting best practices to improve financial inclusion.
One of the key concerns raised in these fora is the lack of reliable data on financial inclusion, which hinders policymaking and the prioritisation of projects at the national, regional and global level. The fact that related concepts have different meanings has also led to difficulty in improving the measurement of financial inclusion. Another difficulty is that the type of variables used to assess financial inclusion may differ from one country or organisation to another. Finally, there are no agreed composite measures of financial inclusion which could facilitate comparisons across time and geography.