Emission Levels of Greenhouse Gases and Inclusive Financing: A Quantile Regression Analysis

This paper examines the impact of inclusive financing on the emission of three GHGs (GHGs) covering countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) from 2002 to 2022. Inclusive finance was represented by accessibility and usage measures of financial inclusion. Accessibility measures are proxied by access to ATMs and commercial bank branches, usage measures by personal remittance received. The examinations in this study were in two stages: first employing the Panel Least Square Regression to obtain a mean regression; then employing quantile regression to assess the impact of inclusive financing on emission levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) in quantiles. The findings from the mean regression examination showed that ATMs accessibility impacts only N2O emissions reduction, while the other financial inclusion proxies had no impact on the GHGs. According to the quantile regression results, access to ATMs decreases N2O emissions and increases CO2 and CH4 emissions in the lowest quantile; access to commercial banks reduces all GHG emissions in the lowest quantile except CH4 and increases CO2 emissions in the highest quantile; remittance received does not impact any GHG in all quantiles. Therefore, this paper recommends the installations of ATMs in key locations to service communities to reduce the distance covered.