Editor's Note: You're not hallucinating, experiencing a weird time warp or flashback. But maybe I am.
- Tim Ogden
1. What the hell?
Yes, this is a new faiV, for the first time since [checks notes; checks notes again; checks calendar on current date; checks calendar on current date and year; hangs head in shame and disbelief] June, 2021. So, you (and I) could hardly be blamed for asking "What the hell happened?" The answer is complicated but mostly prosaic: my time has been focused on a seven-country financial diaries study, and three or four other field work projects that we've been running or participating in. But it's also that the world that the faiV existed in and was a part of has changed a lot. Here I don't mean the pandemic etc., at least not directly. I mean that the world of information creation and sharing has changed dramatically. As we contemplated reviving the faiV at various times in 2022 and 2023, we kept running into barriers like: what platform should we be using? What's getting through email filters now? How do we gather the information to write a faiV? Where are people posting now?
Viewing all posts with tag: Microcredit
Week of July 25th, 2020
Editor's Note: It's been a bit more than four years that I've been writing the faiV and though I probably haven't had as many links as minutes in a year, it's a safe bet that there have been more than 200 faiVs and 4000 links in that time. So I took a bit of an unannounced hiatus for the month. I hope you missed the faiV.
If you did, and you'd be interested in being part of a feedback panel that we are putting together to help us make decisions about the future of the faiV, please just respond to this email. And if you missed us but think the faiV is already perfect, feel free to respond to say that, but more importantly, please tell a few friends and colleagues to subscribe.
In public services announcements, there are a couple of research funding opportunities that may be of interest to you: a) UNESCAP has a new RFP for evidence-based interventions to support women entrepreneurs (in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Fiji, Nepal, Samoa, or Vietnam); and b) ANDE and the Canadian IDRC have a call for Expressions of Interest on studying the experiences of women in venture accelerators in Latin America and SSA.
--Tim Ogden
Read MoreMicrofinance and COVID-19
This edition of faiVLive brought together expert practitioners and researchers to discuss how we should be thinking about the impact of COVID-19 and pandemic control policies on poor households in developing countries, what policy interventions are plausible and possible, what role does microfinance have to play, and what needs to happen to enable the global microfinance industry to be useful now and six months from now.
Read MoreWeek of April 3, 2020
Editor's Note: The only two predictions I feel I confident in making right now are that a) we will find some new phrase for opening a conversation other than "How are you?" or at least some new way to answer the question, and b) that the trend of putting webcams on the bottom of a laptop screen is over. Thanks to all of you who reached out in reaction to the abbreviated version of the faiV last week focused on my concerns about the future of microfinance in the US and globally. Please keep sending information and thoughts my way.
Read MoreWeek of March 23, 2020
Editor’s Note: What a difference a month makes. I've started drafting a new edition of the faiV several times over the last six weeks, but events kept overwhelming the moment and I put it off again. Now it seems that events have overwhelmed everything. And so, here is a special edition of the faiV with few links and only two thoughts around one central theme: the existential crisis for microfinance globally.
Read MoreWeek of January 31, 2020
1. Financial Inclusion/Household Financial Security: It seems strange that I so infrequently have items specifically on microfinance so I leap at the chance when it comes along, particularly when that chance involves one of my soapboxes. For instance: the product is what the users make of it, not what the institution wants it to be. For instance, most microcredit loans aren't investment loans, they're liquidity management tools. Which, of course, makes sense since liquidity management is a more pressing need and the structure of the basic microcredit loan is so ill-suited to business investment. But there are ways to make the standard microcredit loan structure more workable for investment purposes. For instance, borrowers from the largest MFI in China form bogus groups and then funnel all of the loans to a single member to make a larger investment. It's not a niche phenomena either: the authors estimate that 73% of groups are doing this.
Another of my soapboxes is the history of development of financial institutions that serve excluded populations, and where the modern microfinance movement fits in that history. There's a new paper from Marvin Suesse and Nikolaus Wolf on the development rural credit cooperatives in Prussia between 1852 and 1913 (I did say this was a pet interest). And here's a summary version in VoxEU. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you would normally click on, I beg you to reconsider. It's an interesting story about what drove the creation of a new kind of financial services institution in a setting that makes it a bit easier to disentangle causes and effects, and what effect these new institutions had on their communities. I won't spoil the ending but would encourage you to think about how their results would look if measured with an individual-focused impact evaluation.
I will spoil the beginning, though: the formation of credit cooperatives was driven by changes in the economy that increased the need for access to credit. Which brings me to a third soapbox, the Great Convergence (and there's more on that below). Here's a new report from the New York Fed on constrained access to credit in the United States, including a "Credit Insecurity Index." The premise is that access to credit is important for households to manage liquidity, manage investment and manage risk (those are my terms, theirs are "manage emergencies, take advantage of opportunities, or invest"), but that access varies geographically for lots of different reasons. The report tracks 5 tiers of credit access and changes in those tiers over time, by county. There are 11 states where more than 10% of the population lives in credit-insecure counties. It's another way to illustrate how much in common parts of the US, geographically and demographically, have in common with middle-income countries. Speaking of, I'd love to see a similar exercise done in other countries.
Finally, and keeping with the Great Convergence sub-theme, here's a new paper from Jonathan Fu looking at representative data from six "emerging economies" and five "developed economies" to look at "contextual-level" predictors of financial well-being. He finds that more sources of independent information, more competition, and specifically more competition from informal and semi-formal providers helps, and that simple access and financial literacy don't (hey, another soapbox!).
2. Digital Finance: Writing about digital finance is frequently tough because the line between what is "finance" and what is "digital finance" isn't all that clear much of the time. Thirty years ago most credit card transactions were digital (the information was passed over phone lines from modem-to-modem!) but we don't tend to think of that as "digital finance." Another of my soapboxes is that often the "digital" in "digital finance" is used as a justification to pretend the rules of finance don't apply. Here's a useful review in an unusual outlet (Computer) on the "technical potential versus practical reality" of digital finance, specifically blockchain and crypto, for low-income people. It cites some examples I was unaware of and presents the arguments for the benefits pretty clearly. But the best reason to read it is the Challenges section features a heading you almost never see from pieces that emerge from the digital side of digital finance: "Low-income groups' limited power and financial/social capital." Another thing I really like is it draws a distinction between FinTechs and TechFins, the latter being tech firms dabbling in finance.
The Economist has a piece this week on that issue specifically: "how digital financial services can prey upon the poor" with a specific focus on the potential for abuse of data gathered on poor customers who have little understanding of what is being gathered by whom or the consequences (to be fair, none of us do). To the point about the blurred line between finance and digital finance, there's not much there that hasn't been true of non-digital finance for a very long time.
The Economist piece relies heavily on CGAPs long-standing attention to these issues, and Matthew Soursourian and Ariadne Plaitakis have more to add in a look at how digital finance may require changes to competition policy in financial services, specifically as TechFins play a larger role. Oh look, they specifically call out issues of political power!
In their case it's the political power that the market power of TechFins brings, but it's not just the political power of corporations that becomes worrisome in digital finance. The political power of governments is even more concerning to the extent that it enables even more channels for surveillance, oppression and exclusion. Here's a story about Kenya's digital ID initiative that is excluding many marginalized groups from getting the IDs that will soon be necessary for many aspects of life including access to the financial system. But even those people who are included may end up excluded because the government lacks the tools and expertise to protect the very sensitive data that goes into the biometric IDs.
Week of December 6, 2019
1. Trends: Futurism has always come more easily to technologists than policy wonks (probably because it’s easier). But big gatherings are a good chance to look ahead to how the whole inclusive finance ecosystem, getting more complex each year, will evolve. e-MFP’s annual survey of financial inclusion trends – the Financial Inclusion Compass 2019 – was launched during EMW2019, and tries to do just this. If there were a single theme to this paper, it’s the disconnect between, on the one hand, individual stakeholders with their own interests and objectives, and on the other a collective confusion, a ‘soul-searching’ of sorts, for financial inclusion’s purpose amidst the panoply of initiatives and indicators in a sector of now bewildering complexity.
Digital transformation of institutions ranked top, a theme that dominated last year’s European Microfinance Award (EMA) and EMW, with Graham Wright’s keynote call for MFIs to “Digitise or Die!” (and see also the FinDev webinar series on the subject). Client protection remains at the forefront, (second in the rankings, see point 4 below for more going on here) and client-side digital innovations, despite the ubiquitous hype, is only in third overall – and only 7th among practitioners, who actually have to implement FinTech for clients. Do they know something that consultants and investors do not? Among New Areas of Focus (which looks 5-10 years down the track), Agri-Finance is clearly top. The Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab, Mastercard Foundation and ISF Advisors’ Pathways to Prosperity presents the current state-of-the-sector. It’s worth looking at. Finally, Social Performance and/or Impact Measurement is 5th out of 20 trends. There’s too much to choose from here. But the CGAP blog on impact and evidence digs into the subject from a whole range of angles. And check out Tim’s CDC paper [No quid pro quo!--Tim] from earlier this year on the impact of investing in financial systems. Good to see that financial regulators are also giving this the attention it needs.
Finally, finance for refugees and displaced populations generated a lot of comments in the Compass - and was the biggest jumper in the New Area of Focus rankings. It’s been a big part of EMW for the last few years; climate migration was the theme of the excellent conference opening keynote by Tim McDonnell, journalist and National Geographic Explorer, and there’s lots of recent data (here in a World Bank blog) showing refugee numbers at (modern) record levels. Migration of course is inextricably linked to labor conditions. Low paid and low quality work drives migration [maybe we should have more research on migration as a household finance strategy--Tim]. For more on the ‘World of Work’ in the coming century, see below.
2. Climate Change: There may be more evolution in climate change/climate finance than any other area of financial inclusion today. From our side, the European Microfinance Award 2019 on ‘Strengthening Climate Change Resilience’ wrapped up last month, with APA Insurance Ltd of Kenya chosen as the winner for insuring pastoralists against forage deterioration that result in livestock deaths due to droughts . Forage availability is determined by satellite data, via the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). A short video on the program can be seen here.
The severity of climate change and the increasing impact it has on the world’s most vulnerable hardly needs outlining here. Progress has been excruciatingly slow. But a new report by the Global Commission on Adaptation, headed by Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, aims to change that. Released in September 2019, it mapped out a $1.8 trillion blueprint to ready the world to withstand intensifying climate impacts. The Commission launched the report in a dozen capitals, with the overarching goal of jolting governments and businesses into action.
A bunch of recent publications illustrate the overdue acceleration of responses. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Climate Change Resilience Index is pretty stark reading. Africa will be hit the hardest by climate change according to the Index – with 4.7% real GDP loss by 2050 (well supported by the rankings in the ND-Gain index from Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), which summarizes countries’ vulnerability to (and readiness for) climate change. The EIU index shows that institutional quality matters a lot in minimising the effects. The paper also presents three case studies that highlight the importance of both economic development and policy effectiveness to tackle climate change. It’s worth a (fairly frightening) read. So is AFI’s new paper “Inclusive green finance: a survey of the policy landscape”, which asks and answers why financial regulators are working on climate change, how they have been integrating climate change concerns in their national financial inclusion policies and other financial sector strategies, and how they are collaborating with national agencies or institutions. Blue Orchard has also just published "Rethinking Climate Finance" which points to a US$400 billion shortfall by 2030 in climate finance, just to keep global temperatures within the 1.5 Celsius limit. The authors advocate various blended-finance products to encourage private sector investment, which, their survey reveals, is woefully low considering how significantly those investors perceive climate change risk to their portfolios.
Read MoreWeek of October 11, 2019
1. Microfinance: October 2nd was the 10th anniversary of what I consider to be an underappreciated but critical moment in the history of the microfinance movement--David Roodman's piece on how Kiva actually worked. David had already been working on a book about microfinance that was going to be very influential--his open book blog as a whole is a remarkable contribution to the public good, one I wish many more people had decided to replicate--but the Kiva post (based on it being one of the most read blog posts in CGD history according to Justin Sandefur) brought a huge amount of attention to questions about how not only Kiva, but microfinance as a whole, actually worked. I re-read it this week and it's as good as I remember it and definitely makes me pine for the brief glorious time where the development blogosphere was a thing.
There's another important anniversary this week for global microfinance though with a less arbitrarily neat number--Muhammad Yunus's Peace Prize was 13 years ago. Today many were surprised that Greta Thunberg didn't win. The explanation seeming to be both timing and the fact that there is not a direct link between climate change and conflict. There may be a narrowing of the scope of the Peace Prize given that there is certainly no connection between microcredit and reduced conflict. In case you didn't know the winner was Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, who has done some pretty impressive things directly related to peace, like ending the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia and freeing thousands of political prisoners. For what it's worth the Economics Nobel announcement is Monday so expect to see more about that in next week's faiV. Some favorites with particular applicability to the faiV include some combination of Donald Rubin, Josh Angrist, John List and Guido Imbens for kicking off "the credibility revolution" and Michael Kremer, Abhijit Bannerjee, Esther Duflo and/or John List for kicking off the experimental revolution. Of course, I'm hoping for the latter because it would likely give a pretty significant boost to my book sales.
But back to microfinance. Banerjee, Emily Breza, Townsend and Vera-Cossio have a new paper (presented at NEUDC) that uses the Townsend Thai village data and the expansion of a credit program to further bolster what should be the clear consensus on the effect of microcredit: on average not much, but very high returns for some. In this case, they find that there are very large gains for high productivity households who get access to credit (1.5 baht increase in profits for every 1 baht increase in credit) and even higher for those outside agriculture. This is broadly similar to earlier work, now in an NBER paper form, by Banerjee, Breza, Duflo and Cynthia Kinnan on Indian microfinance. Keep in mind, as we continue to see these results, that there is another side of the coin: is there a business model that can reach the high productivity borrowers more exclusively?
2. Inequality: If you think about within-country inequality, you think about taxes. Since the United States has had a huge explosion of income and wealth inequality in the last few decades, and there is a presidential election (hopefully) just over a year away there is a lot of discussion about the US tax system and how it has contributed to the growth of inequality and how it might be used to reduce it. This week there has been a lot of focus particularly on whether the US tax system is progressive or regressive, which seems intuitively like it should be a pretty straightforward question to answer. But the US tax system is so complicated, including not only collecting but distributing cash, it's a controversial question. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman make the case that since the 1950s the US tax system has shifted dramatically toward being regressive. Here's David Leonhardt's shorter version of their argument with cool animated graphics. But not everyone agrees and those differences can't be traced just to ideology. Here's a thread from Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Obama debating Zucman on methodology and interpretation. Here's David Splinter with a more in-depth analysis illustrating why Saez and Zucman get such different numbers than the traditional approaches to analyzing progressivity.
Meanwhile, there is an entirely different question about whether taxes can be used to effectively address inequality (Saez and Zucman's book is all about how the wealthy evade taxes). There's a new NBER paper on the response of rich taxpayers to an increase in the California tax rate. It finds that just under 1% of those subject to the higher taxes moved out of state, and those who stayed found ways to avoid the tax, so that total income from the tax was about half of what it would have been otherwise. Here's Lyman Stone's Twitter summary.
It's not clear how to think about that 50% cut in additional revenue: on the one hand, there is a big increase in tax collection, on the other hand you have to expect that over time people are going to get even better at evading the tax. Here's Lily Batchelder and David Kamin with a comprehensive review of wealth taxation in implementation with hope that wealth taxes can work.
Week of August 16, 2019
1. The Great (Household Finance) Convergence: I've been teasing this for awhile and now it's finally out: my essay for Aspen's Financial Security Program laying out the convergence between the US and developing, especially middle-income, countries especially when it comes to financial inclusion. The essay also highlights areas where mutual learning and collaboration should prove particularly fruitful. While you're there check out the rest of Aspen FSP's work on financial inclusion and keep an eye out for my next essay on "Reinvigorating the Financial Inclusion Agenda" (or, y'know, just wait until it shows up in the faiV; or you could check out this piece I did for CDC (UK) on the value of investing in financial system development).
Now the work for that essay was done a while ago, but the evidence for the convergence thesis (and it's related "corrupted economy" thesis) keeps coming. The past few weeks there were several stories in this vein. For instance, the growing number of American families relying on debt to pay their bills. Sorry, I meant the growing number of Russian families relying on debt to pay their bills. Sorry, I meant the growing number of post-retirement Americans relying on debt to pay their bills and being forced into bankruptcy.
2. Moving to Convergence?/Evidence-Based Policy: Here's a different area of convergence--my interests in the Great Convergence and in evidence-based policy in general and the RCT movement in particular. Part of the argument of the Great Convergence/Corrupted Economy is that the bottom 40% of the American income distribution faces an economy characterized by limited opportunity, with poor jobs, poor education, poor healthcare and housing that closely resembles the economies of middle-income countries. Escaping from these circumstances requires something akin to winning the lottery (Oh, did you hear about Virginia's new program for automatic purchases of lottery tickets? Set it and forget it!). People do win, but it's hard to justify the mental, physical, emotional and economic investment in hard work and building human capital when you are facing a lottery economy (and frequently witness things like this which don't seem to horrify very many people beyond Paddy Carter).
Perhaps you heard about or read the new paper from Chetty et al. on an experiment to revive the Moving to Opportunity program that showed next-generation benefits(but not much in terms of short-term benefits) from moving from poor neighborhoods to wealthier neighborhoods. The results from the experiment were met with a good bit of enthusiasm--here's Nick Kristof, and here's Dylan Matthews.
But the whole thing leaves me pretty uncomfortable for four reasons. One, the whole thing really is a lottery. Jake Vigdor does a good job in this thread of laying out the issues. First, the underlying program is literally a lottery. In fact, all housing assistance in Seattle is the functional equivalent of lottery. So to benefit from the program you would have had to win the lottery of applying for housing assistance at the right time, when there were slots open, and then when the lottery to get one of these vouchers specifically for this type of move.
Second, the program isn't an anti-poverty program as they are traditionally conceived of--it's a test of a program to encourage people who win the double lottery to follow through and actually move to higher-income neighborhood. It turns out that a remarkably small number of people who get housing vouchers like this actually use them--see above on the difficulty of motivating action in a lottery economy. The program works on its own terms--it significantly increases the percentage of people who actually move. But the anti-poverty effects in the theory of change won't be felt until the children of these movers become adults--at least 10 to 15 years from now.
Which raises the third issue. To really consider this an anti-poverty success you have to believe that the things that made the high-income neighborhoods in Seattle good for generational mobility 20 years ago, remain true today, AND that the labor market faced by today's kids will be same in 10 to 15 years further into the future. Those seem to me to be large assumptions.
It's not just that they seem so, the fourth reason is that they are large assumptions. Because the underlying mechanisms that lead to next-generation income mobility haven't been identified in any meaningful way. Other work by Chetty et al has documented the clear existence of high-mobility and low-mobility neighborhoods in the US--that work is a big part of what informs my views on the Great Convergence/Corrupted Economy. But it doesn't make it clear why the good neighborhoods are good, and therefore you have to believe that those factors are invariant over time, which maybe you shouldn't.
Here's the connection to evidence-based policy, and the fourth : this work and the reactions to it seem to me to be a much clearer example of the criticisms of RCTs by folks like Lant Pritchett, Angus Deaton, Glenn Harrison and Martin Ravallion than anything I've seen in the economic development space. You've got black boxes, large unexamined assumptions, a suspension of disbelief due to the methodology, and ultimately the possibility of gains so small (e.g. once you narrow from the winners of the lottery to the people who follow through to the kids who benefit; and all of this is just in one county in the whole country) that you should say, "so what?" instead of cheering.
By the way if you're interested in a different critique of this body of work, and other takes on economic mobility in the US, check out this thread from Scott Winship.
Wrapping up on the evidence-based policy front, it turns out that policy-makers have a lot of behavioral biases.
Week of July 12, 2019
1. Research, Evidence, Policy and Politicians: We talk a lot around here about evidence-based policy and often about the political economy of adopting evidence-based policies. In the last faiV I featured some of the first evidence that elected officials (in this case 2000+ Brazilian mayors) are interested in evidence and will adopt policies when they are shown evidence that they work.
Far be it from me to let such encouraging news linger too long. Here's a new study on American legislators (oddly also 2000+ of them) that finds that 89% of them were uninterested in learning more about their constituents opinions even after extensive encouragement, and of those that did access the information, the legislators didn't update their beliefs about constituent opinions. Here's the NY Times Op-Ed by the study authors.
But wait, there's more! In another newly published study using Twitter data on American congresspeople, Barera et al. find that politicians follow rather than lead interest in public issues. But also that politicians are more responsive to their supporters than to general interest. Which perhaps goes some way to explaining the seeming contradictions between these two studies: American legislators are not interested in accurate data on all of their constituents' opinions, but will follow the opinions of their most vocal supporters.
2. Research Reliability: Two studies of the same population finding at least nominally opposing things published in the same week is kind of unusual, shining a brighter light on the question of research reliability than there normally is. But there have been plenty of other recent instances of the reliability of research being called into question for lots of different reasons:
* The difference between self-reported income and administrative data: the widely known finding that Americans living in extreme poverty (below $2 a day) was based on self-reported income. Re-running that analysis with administrative data that presumably does a better job of capturing access to benefits and other sources of income and wealth finds that only .11 percent of the population actually has incomes this low, and most are childless adults. Here's a Vox write-up of the findings and issues.
* A "pop" book on marriage from an academic claimed that most married women were secretly desperately unhappy. But that's because he misunderstood the survey data, believing that the code "spouse not present" meant that the husband was not in the room when the question was answered, when it really means that the spouse has moved out. Again, Vox does some good work explicating the specifics and the context: most books aren't meaningfully peer reviewed.
* But you probably should be very skeptical of any research on happiness regardless of whether it's peer reviewed because "the necessary conditions for...identification..are unlikely to ever be satisfied."
* And you should be skeptical of many papers studying the persistence of economic phenomena over time, and spatial regressions in general because of the possibility of inflated significance that is really just noise.
* You should also perhaps be skeptical of any claims based on Big 5 personality traits outside of WEIRD countries because the results are not stable across time or interviewers.
* And there are still a lot of issues with the applications of statistical techniques across the social sciences, including, for instance, the misapplication and misinterpretation of RDD designs, or conditioning on post-treatment variables (that's a paper from last year that finds 40% of experiments published in top 6 Political Science journals show evidence of doing so), or using estimated effect sizes to do ex post power calculations.
* Or this Twitter thread about a series of papers published in top medical journals that defies description, other than you really have to read it.
It's enough to make you despair.
