As part of the "Central Bank of the Future" research project undertaken by Primary Investigators Michael S. Barr and Adrienne Harris of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy between December 2018 and May 2021, the Center on Finance, Law & Policy has released a new international dataset describing central banks' financial inclusion mandates from around the world as an open source file.
The Central Bank of the Future project seeks to understand how the role of a central bank could evolve in the future to enable it to make greater contributions toward financial inclusion. The project considers monetary policy, financial sector supervision, and payments systems, as well as other functions. The project also is meant to identify technologies, processes, or tools that could benefit a central bank in supporting public policy objectives related to inclusion, and consider how other sectors, including the private sector and philanthropy, might have a role to play in supporting the development of those tools.
WHAT'S IN THE NEW INTERNATIONAL DATASET?
As part of this research, the Central Bank of the Future research team has developed a new dataset that lists every central bank in the world, and for each, identifies whether that central bank (a) has a charter, and (b) if so, whether that bank charter contains a mandate requiring the central bank to pursue financial inclusion. This is the first tab, labeled "Central Bank Charter Mandates." Where such a mandate exists, we have noted the exact language of the mandate and citation, and added publicly-available links.
We have also added a second tab to this workbook, "2017 Global FICP Survey," which includes the World Bank's 2017 Global Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection (FICP) Survey data. This survey is undertaken and published by the World Bank, not by us, but we found the results useful in providing additional context as we created our own dataset. Additional information is available on the World Bank website at https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/financialinclusion/brief/ficpsurvey.
Our Central Bank Charter Mandates dataset was developed over the project period and released on January 24, 2021. We publish this dataset in the hopes that it will help contribute to a broader international perspective about central banks' current approaches to financial inclusion, and perhaps be useful to policymakers and financial regulators around the world. We note, however, that this data does not attempt to force a reconciled definition of "financial inclusion" across all countries, as the definition of financial inclusion differs globally. Further, this dataset does not capture efforts that a central bank may be making to advance financial inclusion outside of their central banks via legislation, sandboxes/pilot projects, or other governance mechanisms.
The PIs would like to thank the many research assistants from the University of Michigan Center on Finance, Law & Policy who contributed to this dataset. These include Avaskhan Assanaliyev, Charmaine Chua, Cole Magoon, Leslie Kan, Megan Kelly, Bryan Ricketts, Safia Sayed, and Michael Xu. We also thank the Center's assistant director, Christie Baer, who oversaw the completion of this project. Any errors in translation or in content are ours alone.
This work was made possible through the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All of our work is open source and was created for the common good. Anyone is free to use, download, modify, or distribute the materials here for any lawful purpose; please credit: University of Michigan Center on Finance, Law & Policy.