Bank Access and Cultural Entropy across the Regions of India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18335/region.v13i1.658Abstract
Holding a bank account represents access to an important bank service for achieving the formal financial inclusion of an individual. Unfortunately, at present, people living in different regions of India seem to experience a different level of access to this basic bank service and are therefore experiencing different levels of financial market exclusion. This paper studies to what extent social and cultural barriers hinder this effective banking access across the regions of India. Normative caste-based exclusion can be modified by the rigidity of the local context in following inherited norms. This overall cultural rigidity of the context can be termed cultural openness. The Culture Based Development (CBD) approach to quantify cultural openness through the Cultural Entropy measure is employed here. Using data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), I conduct a probit model estimation to test how Cultural Entropy (CE) modifies the caste discrimination effect in access to bank services. I find that the there is strong evidence that regional Cultural Entropy modifies significantly the individual caste discrimination experience across the regions of the country.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Govindapuram Suresh
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
REGION is an open journal, and uses the standard Creative Commons license: Copyright We want authors to retain the maximum control over their work consistent with the first goal. For this reason, authors who publish in REGION will release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution license. This license allows anyone to copy and distribute the article provided that appropriate attribution is given to REGION and the authors. For details of the rights authors grant users of their work, see the "human-readable summary" of the license, with a link to the full license. (Note that "you" refers to a user, not an author, in the summary.) Upon submission, the authors agree that the following three items are true: 1) The manuscript named above: a) represents valid work and neither it nor any other that I have written with substantially similar content has been published before in any form except as a preprint, b) is not concurrently submitted to another publication, and c) does not infringe anyone’s copyright. The Author(s) holds ERSA, WU, REGION, and the Editors of REGION harmless against all copyright claims. d) I have, or a coauthor has, had sufficient access to the data to verify the manuscript’s scientific integrity. 2) If asked, I will provide or fully cooperate in providing the data on which the manuscript is based so the editors or their assignees can examine it (where possible) 3) For papers with more than one author, I as the submitter have the permission of the coauthors to submit this work, and all authors agree that the corresponding author will be the main correspondent with the editorial office, and review the edited manuscript and proof. If there is only one author, I will be the corresponding author and agree to handle these responsibilities.
