What are the Enablers and Impacts of Digital Financial Services? An Updated Evidence Gap Map

Digital financial services (DFS), including mobile money services, have expanded rapidly over the last decade, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This expansion has been accompanied by claims that DFS can alleviate poverty, empower women, help businesses grow, and improve macroeconomic outcomes and government effectiveness. As DFS have become more widespread, governments have increasingly targeted DFS revenues and profits. This has sparked political controversy in some countries and critics have raised concerns that such taxes may undermine financial inclusion and prevent benefits for poor people arising from financial inclusion. Given the rapid expansion of DFS and the hopes placed in them, as well as the proliferation of taxes on DFS, an overview of the evidence on what the enablers and barriers of DFS are, and what the impacts of DFS are, can help policymakers and academic researchers make better-informed assessments about the implications of DFS and decisions about whether and how to tax them. The authors undertook an evidence overview in May 2021 in the form of an Evidence Gap Map (EGM), adopting the EGM approach developed by 3ie, and we performed an updated search for new evidence in November 2022. This brief reports on the findings from our EGM after the updated search.