Financial development, poverty, and human development in the Fintech age: a regional analysis of the Southeast Asian states

This paper examines the effect of financial development in the Fintech age, measured by broad money, domestic credit, and mobile money, on poverty and human development in the Southeast Asian economies. Using unbalanced longitudinal dataset (1990-2017), the findings suggest that broad money and domestic credit contribute to poverty reduction and promote human development. The role of mobile money is seen to have a statistically positive impact only if we analyse it with human development. Additionally, when we take a closer look at the different stage of economic, political and institutional development in this region, we found that the positive effect of broad money and domestic credit is mostly found only in the less developed and less democratic countries. The mobile money, on the other hand, is found to statistically promote the human development in both groups of countries, but there is no statistical relationship for poverty analysis. To avoid the endogeneity bias driven by the fact that the variables in the analysis are not exogenous, the paper uses the instrumental variables and two-stage least squares for panel-data estimations, taking from the economic literature on the role of financial development in developing countries. In doing so, along with additional statistical tests of subsample analysis of political and institutional factors and higher- and lower-income countries, the results confirm the robustness in the analysis.