The “Access to Finance” Project (the Project) aims at collecting annual geographic and demographic data on access to basic consumer financial services worldwide. This is done through the identification and development of appropriate high quality data that are comparable across countries and over time collected by means of periodic surveys. The main envisaged users of these data are researchers and policy makers.
The Project’s data collection effort, with initial financial support from the government of the Netherlands, complements the work done by the United Nations and the World Bank in the context of the UN Advisors Group on Inclusive Financial Sectors in which the IMF is represented. The Project’s periodic surveys make use of the IMF's existing broad network of country correspondents for the IMF's flagship statistical publication—the International Financial Statistics (IFS).The collected annual key financial access indicators are publicly disseminated and support analytical work on:
The main data source for population, area, and GDP numbers used to calculate certain key indicators is the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database.
September 13, 2010