Journal Article
Microcredit, Labor, and Poverty Impacts in Urban Mexico
Improved household accessibility to credit is a significant determinant of intra-household allocation of labor resources with important implications for productivity, income, and poverty status. However, credit accessibility could also have wider...
Working Paper
Poverty and wellbeing impacts of microfinance
Over the last 35 years, microfinance has been generally regarded as an effective policy tool in the fight against poverty. Yet, the question of whether access to credit leads to poverty reduction and improved wellbeing remains open. To address this...
Working Paper
Household Access to Microcredit and Children’s Food Security in Rural Malawi
Using data from the 1995 Malawi Financial Markets and Food Security Survey, this study seeks to discover if women’s relative control over household resources or intra-household bargaining power in rural Malawi, gauged by their access to microcredit...
Working Paper
Social Service Delivery and Access to Financial Innovation
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have...
Working Paper
Loyalty, trust, and glass ceiling
Whereas most research into microfinance tends to focus on the impact of access to such services, very little pays attention to what happens over time once a person becomes a client. The paper aims at analysing the conditions of loan renewals as most...
Working Paper
Vulnerability, Trust and Microcredit
This paper investigates the economic conditions of rural households in China. Historical survey data indicate that over 80 per cent of rural households earn less than 4,500 yuan in net disposable income each year, that for the vast majority of rural...
Journal Article
Improving Financial Inclusion through the Delivery of Cash Transfer Programmes
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via savings...
Working Paper
Why Isn't There More Financial Intermediation in Developing Countries?
This paper proposes to organize thinking about the opportunities for improving and extending financial markets and safety nets for the poor, by focusing on factors that may explain why the linkage of local financial networks and safety nets with the...
Working Paper
Sensitivity of Loan Size to Lending Rates
This paper examines the combined effect of interest rates and poverty levels of microfinance clients on loan size. Cross section data on 2,691 clients and non-clients households from Ghana is used to test the hypothesis of loan price inelasticity...
Working Paper
Incorporating Insurance Provisions in Microfinance Contracts
We examine a simple extension to existing credit contacts for the poor (‘microfinance contracts’), that would allow financial institutions to provide repayment insurance to their clients. The proposed contract uses the repeated nature of loans to...
Research Brief
A Systematic Review of the Impact of Microfinance on Poverty
Microfinance evaluations reveal a positive impact on per capita income, non-land asset value and poverty incidence. Across countries and methodologies, microfinance is most likely to have a short-term positive effect; regionally, the most positive...
Working Paper
Donors' Support for Microcredit as Social Enterprise
The donor community has enthusiastically embraced the concept of microfinance as a promising mechanism to attain the objectives of poverty alleviation and microenterprise development. Amid the high expectation, a myth has been inadvertently created...
Working Paper
Does an Educated Mind Take the Broader View? A Field Experiment on In-group Favouritism among Microcredit Clients
A number of studies document an in-group bias in social dilemma situations. While group structure and dynamics are important in shaping in-group favouritism, less attention has been paid to individual characteristics affecting favouritism. Using data...
Working Paper
Performance of Microfinance Institutions in Burkina Faso
This study tests the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Burkina Faso using indicators such as the sustainable interest rate and the subsidy dependence index. The results indicate that MFIs outreach performance remains very low...
Working Paper
Financial Sector Reforms and Savings Mobilization in Zambia
The paper explores the relationship between financial sector reforms and savings mobilization in Zambia. Although there exists an extensive literature on financial sector development and savings levels in developing countries, there does not seem to...
Working Paper
Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation
This paper explores the relationship between microcredit and poverty reduction. To investigate this question, we posit a bare-bone, household model that outlines the economic environment within which various types of family microenterprises operate...
Book
External Finance for Private Sector Development
Foreign assistance philosophy no longer favours channeling aid almost exclusively to recipients' public sector; 'a bottomless pit'. Increasing preference has been accorded by the donor multilateral development community to the private sector...
Working Paper
Career dynamics and gender gaps among employees in the microfinance sector
While microfinance institutions (MFIs) are increasingly important as employers in the developing world, there is little micro-level evidence on gender differences among MFI employees and MFIs’ relation to economic development. We use a unique panel...
Working Paper
Access to microfinance and female labour force participation
Although microfinance started as a movement to improve women’s economic well-being through increased female entrepreneurship in particular, its impact on women’s attitudes toward and participation in the labour market is not fully understood. We fill...
Working Paper
A Holistic Perception of Foreign Financing of Developing Countries' Private Sectors
The paper presents a comprehensive survey of the ‘shopping list’ of sources of external finance that are directly channeled to the business sector of developing countries. Generally, our analytical survey covers the 1970-2000 period, and includes the...