The purpose of the paper is to empirically investigate the long-run, the short-run and the causal relationship between financial inclusion and sustainable development for two groups of emerging economies. The first group the top ten emerging countries; Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia. Mexico, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore, Russia, and Turkey. The second group includes the other major emerging countries; Egypt, Thailand, Chile, Hungary, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines. The paper uses the panel annual data of each group of emerging countries with 17 years of annual data from 2004 to 2021. The paper applies the panel unit root tests to determine the order of integration of the time series, the panel ARDL Bound test to test whether variables are cointegrated, the Panel VECM to examine the long-run and the short-run dynamics and to determine the speed of adjustment to long run equilibrium.
The paper used the Principal Components Analysis PCA to construct a financial inclusion composite index for each group of emerging countries.