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Displaying all posts under the topic of Savings
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.
April 5, 2013
Measuring (and Missing) Financial Inclusion
The fastest growing part of the financial inclusion movement isn’t a product or even a standard, it’s data and measurement. And if there’s something experts are increasingly agreeing on, it’s that it is illusory to try to define financial inclusion in any precise, universal way. John Gitau says he’s confused, and so am I. How do you measure financial inclusion?
March 7, 2013
FAI Video: A Conversation with Pascaline Dupas
Pascaline Dupas of Stanford University talks to FAI about testing a commitment savings product for health investments. You can read more about the experiment in Dupas's paper with Jonathan Robinson, "Why Don't the Poor Save More? Evidence from Health Savings Experiments," and more about the latest in savings on our site at Big Questions-Savings.
One way to cope with an emergency is to borrow money from family and friends. But that typically doesn’t work when a disaster strikes a whole area. Sending and receiving money over larger distances, when transferring cash from person-to-person is impractical or impossible, can be very expensive. There are a litany of costs, from communications, to finding and traveling to agents, to the actual financial cost of the transfer. And don’t forget the cost of delay—in an emergency, delays in receiving needed funds can have big consequences.
February 1, 2013
Barriers and Constraints to Risk Management and Savings
Whether the result of variable incomes, liquidity constraints or reduced access to formal financial services, poor households face unique financial constraints that undermine their ability to effectively guard against risk and accumulate meaningful savings. There’s been a lot of research into these questions in the last few years.
January 15, 2013
Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion
About 2.5 billion adults, just over half the world’s adult population, lack bank accounts. If we are to realize the goal of extending banking and other financial services to this vast “unbanked” population, we need to consider not only such product innovations as microfinance and mobile banking but also issues of data accuracy, impact assessment, risk mitigation, technology adaptation, financial literacy, and local context.
October 10, 2012
Piggy banks and other “banks on hooves”
Why are piggy banks in the shape of a pig? I had been certain that piggy banks were simply a decorative representation of the fact that keeping a pig (or any livestock) is an informal way to save—“deposits” paid into the pig by feeding and housing it can be “withdrawn” once the pig is sold. A bit of research informed me, however, that the etymologists have the economists beat on this one.
August 15, 2012
A Tether to Harness the Power of Remittances
Remittances represent an important source of income for millions of households around the world. The size of remittance flows, as compared to a country’s own domestic output, can reach numbers as high as 30% (that’s in Tajikistan, if you’re wondering.) This has led economists and policymakers alike to ask whether remittances can be relied upon to spur development.
An Expert Recommendation from our Big Questions Section on the topic of Savings
FAI asked Jessica Goldberg to tell us about the research papers that have influenced how she thinks about savings and the poor. This is what she told us:
I tend to think of the papers that have influenced my thinking about savings as making three related, big-picture points:
An Expert Recommendation from our Big Questions Section on the topic of Savings
FAI asked Chris Dunford to tell us about books and papers that really made a difference in how he thought about savings and the poor. This is his response: