Narrow Results

The social capital school has proposed that one of the key mechanisms for generating good democratic outcomes is participation in voluntary associations. Of late, group-based microcredit programmes are considered as effective policy instruments for generating and strengthening civic networks of the community. However, on the micro-level we do not know enough about how membership in microcredit programmes promotes civic engagement, nurtures democratic learning process and makes their members more cooperative. In this paper I investigate whether microcredit providing NGOs have run through and nurtured democratic practices at the local level and whether they mobilize citizens politically and promote leadership among the women. The results indicate that microcredit organizations in the area that I studied failed to promote women's political capabilities or civic engagement since these organizations mainly concentrate on the services of credit distribution and installments collection, and have deviated or shifted away from community mobilization.

Improved access to credit influences socio-economic growth. Accordingly, financial support schemes have been used widely as a development tool to help underserved individuals grow and elevate themselves out of poverty. Uplifting women, who are subject to unfair treatment because of gender biases, have been a major target of these programs. Therefore, the present study examines one such government microcredit scheme, the Mudra Yojana, which supports individuals financially to start an enterprise or expand the existing one by providing collateral-free loans. Further, it encourages female participants by charging lower interest rates. The present study, based on 417 female beneficiaries from the tribal districts of West Bengal, India, investigates how financial support has benefitted women in their socio-economic growth. It evaluates the scheme’s effect based on women’s employability and empowerment level. To analyze the data, the study employs ordered logistic regression, Wilcoxon Sign test, effect size, etc. The results suggest micro-credit through Mudra Yojana encourages female entrepreneurship, raises earnings and employability, and thereby empowers them financially, socially, psychologically and in the political arena. The findings of these studies reinforce the fact women could be “active agents of change” and play an important role in both the family and society.

Microcredit offers an innovative response to non-traditional financing and development needs for marginalized individuals. Here, impact assessment is very useful in that it helps to determine whether or not the objectives set at the onset are achieved and what can be done to correct the impediments to achieve better results. The paper analyzes the socio-economic effect of microcredit through the novel dual approach of self-reported perception and relationships with others. The data were gathered in collaboration with the Fonds Mauricie in November, 2019. Apart from the improvement in the financial indicators of micro-enterprises, the results show that microcredit has enhanced micro-entrepreneurs’ living conditions and family situation at rates of 88 and 91 percent, respectively. Regarding morale, 88 percent of micro-entrepreneurs report feeling better and optimistic about the future, and 92 percent report better relationships with others. In particular, the socio-economic effect of microcredit is determined by a better family situation, better living conditions and better financial situation and business income. These results imply that microfinance institutions must extend their financing to all segments of the population, especially the most vulnerable people such as immigrants and indigenous peoples.

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have been criticized for charging high interest rates on loans. Building on multiple-principal agency theory, we argue that when an MFI acquires proprietary information about its clients through monitoring, it gains an information advantage over other lenders enabling it to extract rents by charging higher interest rates. Using data from 712 MFIs across 62 countries from 2010 to 2018, we find this to be the case. Furthermore, we find that MFIs that make more relationship-based loans, operate in less competitive markets, and those driven by for-profit commercial banking logic are more likely to extract even greater rents.

The inequality of wealth distribution across the globe is no secret. One out of every three people in the world live on less than $3.10 per day. Nearly one in 10 lives in extreme poverty, which according to the World Bank is an income of less than $1.90 per day. The global distribution of poverty is uneven as well, with more than 75% of those living in extreme poverty living in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. This sobering fact has driven various organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, and many non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, to initiate programs targeted at reducing poverty. Microfinance is just one of many innovative tools in the global effort to shrink the wealth gap.

Poverty continues to affect billions of lives across the globe. Microfinance is but one tool of many that strives to alleviate poverty. Specifically, microfinance serves the demand the poor have for financial services. The poor have been traditionally excluded from formal financial services, but through innovative financial products, such as group lending, microfinance institutions have been able to address the challenges in lending to the poor while delivering products—microcredit, microsavings, insurance, and more—that can help clients lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

With the help of network organizations, microfinance investment vehicles, donors, and technical support providers, microfinance institutions attempt to reach the underserved and to include them as fully as possible in financial systems around the world. This effort has grown from a handful of organizations serving a few clients to many thousands of microfinance institutions reaching hundreds of millions of low-income people across the globe.

The following chapters will take a closer look at poverty, microfinance, the industry, the impact of microfinance on the poor, and the key players that make microfinance possible.

The rural credit market in Vietnam is characterised as a segmented and emerging market where the growing demand for credit by the poor and low-income households is unmet. This chapter examines the main characteristics of three pillars in Vietnam rural credit market including demand, supply and government policies. While the demand for rural credit is unmet, the supply of credit simultaneously comes from formal, informal and semi-formal providers. To improve credit accessibility, government policies targeting the poor have overcome the obstacle of collateral loan for the poor; however, asymmetric information inherently prevents the poor from having access to credit not only from the borrower’s side but also from the credit institutions. Therefore, improving credit accessibility to the poor and rural households continues a challenging task for policy makers in order to achieve long term development goal in Vietnam.

Gap in credit access to rural poor population in China exists because rural households, especially farmers, are constrained to access credit from formal Rural Financial Institutions (RFIs). The risky nature of agriculture business and the absence of land ownership due to China’s village-based communal land-tenure system hinder the farmers from accessing formal credit requiring collateral and force them to resort to informal borrowings that charge exorbitant interest rates. The subsidisedloan programme implemented by the Chinese government in 1986–2000 failed to reduce the credit access gap because it was poorly managed, missed the target borrowers (poor rural households) and was financially unsustainable due to the low repayment rate. Microcredit programme was then introduced in 1994 to bring more effective and sustainable rural poverty eradication. This chapter provides an overview of the rural financial system, rural credit market and the development of microcredit in China. The chapter concludes that microcredit may significantly reduce the gap in the rural credit market and play an important role in rural poverty alleviation provided some reforms are implemented both at RFIs as well as national policy making levels.

Microcredit programme was introduced in China in 1994 to ameliorate rural poverty in a financially sustainable way. Since the year 2000, microcredit programmes have been mostly carried out by Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs) that have successfully expanded the financial access to farmers and at the same time achieved high timely repayment rate. This chapter draws the case of RCCs’ microcredit in Hubei Province and looks at whether the implementation of RCCs’ microcredit is an effective instrument to improve the rural households’ welfare and whether it actually reaches the poorest population in rural areas. The evidence show that poor rural households are still constrained to access the microcredit due to some household-related factors as well as obstacles at RCCs’ institutional level. The RCCs’ microcredit marginally improve borrowers’ welfare and the positive impact on welfare only takes effect as the cumulative amount of loan grows. RCCs’ microcredit also enables women in rural China to have better social status which is manifested in several dimensions of women empowerment.

The theoretical basis of modern cosmology was laid out soon after Einstein’s 1915 discovery of general relativity. Friedmann first worked out models of the expanding Universe, with Lemaitre adding the concepts of redshift and the initial Big Bang. Hubble’s 1929 discovery of cosmic expansion was the first observational milestone. The hot Big Bang theory accumulated more substance as the first theoretical predictions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and of Big-Bang nucleosynthesis were made by Alpher, Gamow, and Herman in the 1940’s. A watershed moment in observational cosmology came with the 1965 discovery of the CMB [1], which was the first direct evidence for the hot and dense initial state of the Universe. Meanwhile, astronomical evidence accumulated for the evolution of the Universe over time, as increasingly distant galaxies were discovered. Soon after quasars were identified as high-redshift objects, Gunn & Peterson [2] used their spectra (in 1965) to show that the inter-galactic gas around them was highly ionized; this was the first sign that the gas had undergone cosmic reionization, likely by the stars in early galaxies.