The Korea Local Administration Review

This study evaluates the MG community credit cooperative’s (MG) contributions to regional finance. MG was compared with the Credit Union, which has similar goals and characteristics to MG. An index of financial inclusion(IFI) was adopted to measure the contribution to regional finance, which evaluates three areas of regional finance: (1) the level of bank penetration, (2) provision of financial services, and (3) considerations to vulnerable groups. Our results show that MG’s IFI score has improved over the past years, but the Credit Unions’ overall score was higher. MG performed better than Credit Union only in the financial penetration area. These results suggest that MG has room to improve its contribution by providing more financial services to socially vulnerable groups.