Yingjie Fan

• Stanford University

Much has been debated on the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's financial inclusion and the need for supportive policy actions (Azar and Mejía 2020, Schuttenbelt 2020, IFC 2020). However, evidence is scarce, partly due to lack of well-curated data in this area. This note reviews women's financial access during the COVID-19 pandemi...

The rapid uptake of mobile money in recent years has generated new data needs and growing interest in understanding its impact on broad money. This paper reviews mobile money trends using mobile money data from the Financial Access Survey (FAS) and examines the statistical treatment of mobile money under the IMF’s Monetary and Financial Statistics...

In today’s digitized world, social distancing need not imply a disruption in financial transactions. Individuals and corporations have been increasingly embracing digital financial services (DFS), including mobile money. The IMF Financial Access Survey (FAS), which receives data on financial access and use from 189 jurisdictions, shows that the use...

The cross-border flow of people for educational exchange in Western democracies is seen as a way to transfer democratic values to non-democratic regions of the world. What happens when students studying in the West encounter discrimination? Based on an experiment among hundreds of Chinese first-year undergraduates in the United States, we show that...

This departmental paper marks the 10th anniversary of the IMF Financial Access Survey (FAS). It offers a retrospective of the FAS database, along with some reflections as to its future directions. Since its 2009 launch, the FAS has provided granular data on access to and use of financial services. It is a supply-side database with annual global cov...