Financial Consumers - Promoters of Sustainable Development? Evidences from Europe and Central Asia

Achieving the goals of sustainable development is a complex process that requires a sustained financial effort on the part of public authorities and a major involvement on the part of international institutions. In addition, both public authorities and international bodies must create the legislative framework to support the promotion of the principles of sustainable development at various levels of economic activity. Given the complexity and importance of promoting sustainable development, citizens also play an important role in this process. This category of stakeholders can be involved in various forms, both through proactive and reactive behaviour. Thus, they must be responsible in the consumption process, but they must sanction through specific mechanisms the opportunistic or irresponsible behaviour of some companies. Given the importance of financial resources to support the process of transition to a green economy, citizens must be able to make the best possible financial decisions, both in the process of saving and investing. For this reason, financial education acquires new values, given the repercussions that a wrong financial decision can have both economically and socially. However, financial education is just one of the pillars supporting the process of promoting sustainable development. Sustained efforts must also be made by financial institutions and financial market supervisory authorities in the process of reducing social exclusion. The current health crisis has demonstrated the importance of digitizing financial operations. Financial innovation and Fintech must be focused on increasing financial inclusion and attracting vulnerable groups to the financial circuit. The goal of the research consists in analysing the evolution of two global financial inclusion indicators which are among the pillars of digitizing the financial operations. The values of the two global financial inclusion indicators mentioned above were computed by the Word Bank in 2014 and 2017. The research focuses on analysing the values of the two indicators by gender, for 48 countries from Europe and Central Asia.