Financial Inclusion: What Everyone Needs to Know®

by Jonathan Morduch, Timothy Ogden

Over 30 percent of the world's adults lack access to basic financial tools - more often women, members of minority groups, and poor families. The ability to buy what you need, when you need it, to put money aside for the future, and to withstand bad luck without financial ruin seem like basic elements of life in a functioning economy. But life is not that simple for people who lack financial tools. In fact, the tighter the budget, the more you need and benefit from financial services. Financial inclusion, or to put another way, having the tools necessary to take control of one's finances and make progress towards one's goals, is essential to a just and fair society.

In Financial What Everyone Needs to Know® , prominent experts Jonathan Morduch and Timothy Ogden explain in straightforward language how the lack of financial inclusion reinforces broader inequities in our society. Using their extensive backgrounds in finance, technology, economic change, and inequality, Morduch and Ogden detail efforts to guarantee that all people, rich and poor, have access to quality financial services and the ability to make prudent financial choices.

Framed by the simple concept of equal access, this book explains the mechanisms of one of the most contentious and misunderstood parts of modern economics by answering a few core What is financial inclusion? Why does it matter? How does it work? When doesn't it work? What are the risks? and How can more people be included?

208 pages, Paperback

Expected publication January 1, 2042

About the author

Jonathan Morduch (born October 3, 1963) is a professor of public policy and economics at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He is a development economist most well known for his significant academic contributions to assessing the impact of microfinance since the early years of the movement. He has written extensively on poverty and financial institutions in developing countries and on tensions between achieving social impacts and meeting financial goals in microfinance.

Morduch is the managing director of the Financial Access Initiative, a consortium of leading development economists (including Sendhil Mullainathan at Harvard and Dean Karlan at Yale) that aims to expand access to financial services for low-income individuals in developing countries through research, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Morduch is currently chair of the United Nations Committee on Poverty Statistics. He is a member of the editorial board of the World Bank Economic Review and of the UN Advisors Group on Inclusive Financial Sectors. Murdoch also serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).