Resumen de Financial Inclusion, Remittances and Entrepreneurship: an experiment in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico
Alfredo Cuecuecha Mendoza, Patricia Meneses Ortíz, Arturo Vasquez Corona, Gerardo Suárez González
This paper presents a Randomized Control Treatment (RCT) that consisted in providing smartphones, training in business skills and financial education to individuals in the State of Tlaxcala, Mexico to study its impact on measures of Financial Inclusion and other household outcomes in the period 2011-14. The results show statistically significant effects in measures of usage and quality, but not in measures of depth or stability of financial services. The results also show positive effects on micro business activities and wealth, but no effects on household income and expenditures. All effects are found to be smaller for households that receive remittances. These results show that, in the presence of low-cost financial services, households prefer to invest their savings in micro business activities or real assets and confirm that households that receive remittances relax their credit constraints.