Explaining Digital Payments Adoption with Econometrics and Explainable Machine Learning: Cross-Country Evidence from a Global Household Survey

By Saida Hajjaji This paper studies the determinants of individual adoption of digital payments using the Global Findex Database 2025, released by the World Bank and based on nationally representative household surveys conducted in 2024 across 141 economies. We combine a standard econometric approach with explainable machine learning (ML) methods in order to provide both transparent global benchmarks and granular, policy-relevant insights into digital payment behaviours. We first estimate a parsimonious logistic regression model on a broad multi-country sample of 5,189...