In the past few weeks, the local government of West Bengal has been embroiled in a financial and political crisis that has potentially large impacts on the state’s poor and its MFIs.  After discovering that the commercial entity the Saradha Group had duped thousands of investors through a real estate Ponzi scheme, the state minister launched a full investigation of over 70 other deposit-taking entities which are grouped under the category of “chit funds.”

In last week’s blog post, I suggested that self-reported data should be supplemented with objective sources of information from independent third-party entities. Sometimes, however, independent data sources simply aren’t available and researchers have no choice but to base their analysis on self-reported data. Under these circumstances, some data collection methodologies might be more useful than others in ensuring that self-reported data are reliable.

Half of the adults in the world are “unbanked” -- about 2.5 billion people. That’s the starting point of a new book, Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion, published by the MIT Press.

Right now there is a lot of talk about allowing more geographic mobility to enable more economic mobility--in other words, easing immigration restrictions. There is powerful evidence that enabling more migration (internal and external) would be a powerful tool to fight global poverty.