PONE-D-21-28479Impact of e-money on money supply: Estimation and policy implication for BangladeshPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Nizam,

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I would like to thank the authors for the effort and quality of the manuscript.

The paper proposes an analysis of Bangladesh money supply, and in particular of the impact that the introduction of Mobile Financial Services (MFS) have had on it in recent years. MFS represent a recent and rapidly increasing innovation, which is now massively used in Bangladesh, allowing people and merchants to make payments and transactions with e-money through the use of mobile phones. E-money can only be issued by licensed entities, in exchange for an equal amount of legal tenders.

The authors show the big impact MFS have had on Bangladesh money supply since their introduction, contributing to around 10% of relevant quantities between 2018 and 2021, and argue that such increase in money supply show how an increase in MFS coverage across the country (especially in rural parts), could effectively work better at stimulating economic growth than artificially capping interest rates.

The manuscript has a clear and well-paced exposition. In particular, I appreciated the space reserved to the historical and national context of Bangladesh, both in terms of financial and monetary interventions, but also banking and internet coverage, in the manuscript and in particular introduction and paragraph 3. Moreover, the author also spends dedicate space to carefully introducing all relevant economic terms and definitions in two dedicated paragraphs (2 and 4), which greatly improve the readability of the manuscript, avoiding possible confusion and making each claim in the manuscript clear and narrow. In particular, this also allows a possibly more interdisciplinary audience to understand a more economics paper as this one, which I find particularly suited to this journal.

The analysis per-se can be considered quite simple, as the data and estimates only involve the computation and analysis of different aggreagate numbers. However, it is my opinion that the overall paper, in terms of national context, extended explanation of the necessary terms and definitions, detailed analysis of the different trends in terms of the national context, and discussion of these in light of different economic policies, provide a complete enough work to be considered for publication in Plos One.

I therefore recommend the acceptance of this paper for publication in PLOS ONE.

I just want to highlight a couple minor comments, which would slightly improve the paper in my opinion, but do not prevent me from recommending acceptance:

1. the abstract should reserve more space to the quantitative results (e.g. the ~10% of money supply due to MFS), and a bit less space to the qualitative argument against capping interest rates, to reflect the importance of the results and the space reserved in the manuscript to both

2. Some space could be dedicated in the discussion to limitations or possible extension of the work. In particular, a natural extension of this study, to better understand the dynamics and importance of MFS transactions, could be to study the network of these MFS transactions, to better understand the role played by different kinds of agents (merchants, people ecc) and the effective inclusivity of such system (how many rural people are actually active, what's the distribution of total money in accounts etc.).

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Reviewer #1: No

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Impact of e-money on money supply: Estimation and policy implication for Bangladesh

PONE-D-21-28479R1

Dear Dr. Nizam,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Federico Botta

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I wanna thank the authors for addressing my previous minor comments.

I am happy to confirm my previous review and recommend the paper for publication, and look forward to further work using this interesting dataset.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No