Klapper, Leora

Person:
Klapper, Leora

Development Research Group, World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Financial Inclusion, Financial Sector Development, Gender, Private Sector Development, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Jobs

External Links

Global Findex

Departments

Development Research Group, World Bank

Last updated: January 9, 2025

Biography

Leora Klapper is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. She is a founder of the Global Findex database, co-editor of the World Bank Economic Review, and was Director of the 2022 World Development Report Finance for an Equitable Recovery. She has published widely in refereed journals on corporate and household finance, fintech, banking, and entrepreneurship. Her current research studies the impact of digital financial services, especially for women. Previously, she worked at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Salomon Smith Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in Financial Economics from New York University Stern School of Business.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 66

The Global Findex Database 2021: Financial Inclusion, Digital Payments, and Resilience in the Age of COVID-19
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-06-29) Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Ansar, Saniya; Klapper, Leora; Singer, Dorothe
The fourth edition of the Global Findex offers a lens into how people accessed and used financial services during the COVID-19 pandemic, when mobility restrictions and health policies drove increased demand for digital services of all kinds. The Global Findex is the world’s most comprehensive database on financial inclusion. It is also the only global demand-side data source allowing for global and regional cross-country analysis to provide a rigorous and multidimensional picture of how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage financial risks. Global Findex 2021 data were collected from national representative surveys of about 128,000 adults in more than 120 economies. The latest edition follows the 2011, 2014, and 2017 editions, and it includes a number of new series measuring financial health and resilience and contains more granular data on digital payment adoption, including merchant and government payments. The Global Findex is an indispensable resource for financial service practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and development professionals.
Expanding Financial Inclusion through Digital Financial Services: A Literature Review
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Klapper, Leora
Worldwide, account ownership increased by 50 percent in the 10 years spanning 2011 to 2021, to reach 76 percent of the global adult population. The goal of financial inclusion is not just for more adults to have accounts but for account owners to benefit from using them, such as for digital payments, which provide a range of positive benefits that extend far beyond convenience. This paper reviews the evidence demonstrating how digital payments can expand financial inclusion among recipients and encourage the use of additional formal financial services, such as savings, credit, and insurance. It explores how digital transactions offer greater security and privacy, especially for women, as well as opportunities to build a digital credit history for credit risk assessments. The introduction of digital payments to low-income adults brings some risks, however, such as fraud and phishing scams targeting accounts, over indebtedness in digital credit, and customers receiving incomplete or incorrect information on the fees and costs of financial products.
Financial Inclusion and Economic Development: A Review of the Data and Evidence
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-09) Ansar, Saniya; Klapper, Leora; Singer, Dorothe
This paper reviews the impact of financial inclusion on economic development outcomes. It highlights the benefits of financial inclusion, including greater savings, improved resilience to economic shocks, and higher levels of economic empowerment, among others. It looks deeper into both the effects of financial inclusion on marginalized groups, like women and the poor, while also examining the impacts of different types of financial instruments, like digital payments and financial accounts. The paper further explores the role that government payment programs and regulatory actions can play in inducing greater financial inclusion, highlighting the need for more policies, products, and incentives to promote greater adoption of financial services for sustainable development.
Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-04-19) Singer, Dorothe; Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Ansar, Saniya; Klapper, Leora; Hess, Jake
The Global Findex database is the world's most comprehensive set of data on how people make payments, save money, borrow and manage risk. Launched in 2011, it includes more than 100 financial inclusion indicators in a format allowing users to compare access to financial services among adults worldwide -- including by gender, age and household income. This third edition of the database was compiled in 2017 using nationally representative surveys in more than 140 developing and high-income countries. The database includes updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services. It features additional data on Fintech and digital financial services, including the use of mobile phones and internet technology to conduct financial transactions. Global Findex data is utilized to track progress toward the World Bank's goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020 and the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. The data also is a source for the G20 Financial Inclusion Indicators and a benchmark for policymakers seeking to expand access to and use of financial services. Lastly, this report discusses opportunities to expand access to financial services among the unbanked, and ways to promote greater use of digital financial services among the underbanked.
Financial Inclusion, Women, and Building Back Better
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Hess, Jake; Klapper, Leora; Beegle, Kathleen
Financial inclusion occurs when adults have access to appropriate, affordable, and well-regulated financial services to meet their needs effectively and improve their lives. Financial inclusion is a growing global phenomenon. Since 2011, more than one billion adults have opened an account at a financial institution, such as a bank or a mobile money provider. Despite the progress, however, women continue to lag behind men. In low- and middle-income economies, men are 9 percentage points more likely than women to have an account, a gender gap that has stubbornly persisted. And there is considerably variation among countries. Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the world are providing relief payments and financial support to citizens and businesses. If such transfers could be transacted digitally, this might help unbanked people, especially women, obtain accounts for the first time. Digital government payments are a proven way to boost women’s financial inclusion. Globally, roughly 140 million people, of which 80 million are women, opened their first accounts to receive digital government payments, such as safety net subsidies, public pension funds, or public sector wage payments, according to the Global Findex (Demirguc-Kunt and others 2018). Government COVID-19 relief and recovery payments create opportunities to rectify the gender gap in financial inclusion, mitigate the pandemic’s economic fallout and build resilience against future emergencies. In addition, the momentum brought on by the policy responses to the pandemic offers opportunities to tackle long-standing challenges to financial inclusion. This note outlines critical priority areas toward this goal.
Changing Perceptions of Institutions and Standard of Living in Iraq
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09) Ansar, Saniya; Celiku, Bledi; Klapper, Leora; Mansour, Wael
The history of Iraq over the past decade is a stark example of increasing vertical and horizontal inequalities, preceding and following a period of violent conflict. This paper uses a cross-section of individual-level nationally representative survey data to study relationships around how adults in Iraq report confidence in national institutions, quality of life, and quality of service delivery. The findings show that positive perceptions across these categories declined during ISIS-control and have slowly picked up in recent years. Men are more likely than women in the post-ISIS period to report lower country leadership approval ratings, a weaker standard of living, and depressed job prospects. The analysis finds that self-identified Shias, Kurds, and adults living in Baghdad are significantly more likely to have a poorer quality of life, compared with Sunnis, in the post-ISIS period. Nearly all ethno-religious groups, in all periods, perceive the government to be corrupt.
Toward Successful Development Policies: Insights from Research in Development Economics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Artuc, Erhan; Cull, Robert; Dasgupta, Susmita; Fattal, Roberto; Filmer, Deon; Gine, Xavier; Jacoby, Hanan; Jolliffe, Dean; Kee, Hiau Looi; Klapper, Leora; Kraay, Aart; Loayza, Norman; Mckenzie, David; Ozler, Berk; Rao, Vijayendra; Rijkers, Bob; Schmukler, Sergio L.; Toman, Michael; Wagstaff, Adam; Woolcock, Michael
What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13 short, nontechnical briefing notes prepared in response to this request, summarizing a selection of major insights in development economics in the past decade. The notes synthesize evidence from recent research on how policies should be designed, implemented, and evaluated, and provide illustrations of what works and what does not in selected policy areas.
Learning to Navigate a New Financial Technology: Evidence from Payroll Accounts
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Breza, Emily; Kanz, Martin; Klapper, Leora
How do inexperienced consumers learn to use a new financial technology? This paper presents results from a field experiment that introduced payroll accounts in a population of largely unbanked factory workers in Bangladesh. In the experiment, workers in a treatment group received monthly wage payments into a bank or mobile money account while workers in a control group continued to receive wages in cash, with a subset also receiving an account without automatic wage payments. The results show that exposure to payroll accounts leads to increased account use and consumer learning. Those receiving accounts with automatic wage payments learn to use the account without assistance, begin to use a wider set of account features, and learn to avoid illicit fees, which are common in emerging markets for consumer finance. The treatments have real effects, leading to increased savings and improvements in the ability to cope with unanticipated economic shocks. An additional audit study provides suggestive evidence of market externalities from consumer learning: mobile money agents are less likely to overcharge inexperienced customers in areas with higher levels of payroll account adoption. This suggests potentially important equilibrium effects of introducing accounts at scale.
Leveraging Digital Financial Solutions to Promote Formal Business Participation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019) Miller, Margaret; Klapper, Leora; Hess, Jake
This paper explores economic informality and how it relates to digital financial inclusion. It focuses specifically on the potential role that digital financial services–including those accessed through mobile phones and the internet can play in encouraging businesses to formalize their operations. The data show wide variations in the extent of informality as well as the financial inclusion of informal business owners. The paper finds that digital financial services can make it easier for informal firms to register and operate as a formal business, while also creating synergies between individual reform efforts. For example, companies that use a digital payroll system can easily make pension contributions when online platforms are available. Digital financial transactions also make it easier for governments to enforce laws and regulations, including tax collection. However, there are several important caveats. It is not clear that formalizing small transactions is an effective way to increase tax collection. As the digital economy grows and countries seek to curb informality, policymakers should tailor their programs to the needs and realities of different groups of enterprises.
The Global Findex Database 2014: Measuring Financial Inclusion around the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04) Singer, Dorothe; Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Van Oudheusden, Peter; Klapper, Leora
The Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, launched by the World Bank in 2011, provides comparable indicators showing how people around the world save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The 2014 edition of the database reveals that 62 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a bank or another type of financial institution or with a mobile money provider. Between 2011 and 2014, 700 million adults became account holders while the number of those without an account—the unbanked—dropped by 20 percent to 2 billion. What drove this increase in account ownership? A growth in account penetration of 13 percentage points in developing economies and innovations in technology—particularly mobile money, which is helping to rapidly expand access to financial services in Sub-Saharan Africa. Along with these gains, the data also show that big opportunities remain to increase financial inclusion, especially among women and poor people. Governments and the private sector can play a pivotal role by shifting the payment of wages and government transfers from cash into accounts. There are also large opportunities to spur greater use of accounts, allowing those who already have one to benefit more fully from financial inclusion. In developing economies 1.3 billion adults with an account pay utility bills in cash, and more than half a billion pay school fees in cash. Digitizing payments like these would enable account holders to make the payments in a way that is easier, more affordable, and more secure.