Blog
Blog postsRSS
April 5, 2012
What should regulators do?
There’s not enough academic research on the regulation of financial inclusion. Many of the questions might seem too applied for some researchminded economists, but that leaves regulators with few guideposts. It also seems short-sighted.
Regulators hope that expanding financial access will also provide greater stability to the overall financial system. This would occur as the market becomes larger and more diverse, and thus better able to withstand difficulties in any particular corner. The range of depositors would enlarge, as would the kinds of financial institutions in the market. Greater competition among providers would create pressure for quality competition.
March 27, 2012
Can the expansion of microfinance add up to macro impacts?
The most basic question is the micro one: whether microfinance typically yields notable impacts on the lives of low-income families. The logical follow-on is, to the extent that micro impacts emerge, how do those impacts
add up? Is there a reasonable case that expanding microfinance can make a dent in regional or national economic growth rates? In national-level poverty rates?
March 16, 2012
Links We Like
A sampling of what we've been reading this week from around the web:
March 13, 2012
Is Micro Too Small? Microcredit vs. SME Finance
The original promise of microcredit was to reduce poverty by fostering self-employment in low-income communities, an idea first promoted at mass scale in Bangladesh (Yunus 1999). But critics of Muhammad Yunus and the Bangladesh microcredit model argue that supporting larger businesses (small and medium enterprises or SMEs) may instead create more and better jobs for poor individuals (e.g., Karnani 2007, Dichter 2006). That’s only possible, however, if those larger enterprises employ poor workers in large...
March 8, 2012
Links We Like
Articles, blogs and papers we've been reading over the past month:
March 7, 2012
Living on 100 Rupees a Day
Last week Public Radio International reported on two young middle-class Indian men who spent three weeks in Bangalore living on 100 rupees a day followed by one week living at India’s controversial new poverty line of 32 rupees a day (roughly equal to 60 cents).
March 6, 2012
FAI Hires Interim Director
FAI is excited to announce Timothy Ogden has joined as Interim Director.
February 21, 2012
The financial inclusion challenge as an information revolution
The notion that we cannot count on brick-and-mortar investments to massively expand access to finance in developing countries is now widely accepted. We need to go branchless, and to do so safely we have an opportunity to leverage mobile phones that are increasingly ubiquitous. That’s clear at an infrastructure level, but I don’t think there is much understanding of what that means at the service level. Let me paint the picture as I see it, at the risk of sounding all high-level and new agey. ...
February 15, 2012
The True Costs of Joining the Formal Financial System
What products are “right” for people who are outside of the formal financial system and/or poor? It’s a question as relevant in developed economies as in developing ones. During the housing bubble in the US, financial inclusion was often a justification for what in retrospect looks more like predatory behavior.