This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impacts of economy-wide microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small-scale businesses. In our analysis, we find that the redistributive impacts of microfinance are stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the aggregate impacts are smaller. Making the typical microfinance program mo...

The organization, technology and operation of microfinance have undergone much change and differentiation. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel-prize winner first demonstrated the possible empowerment of poor people by means of microfinance. Even so, certain cases have indicated that this empowerment does not necessarily occur and that microfinance can even be damaging. In this paper, we describe a case stu...

Attempts to measure the depth of outreach in microfinance usually start—and often end—with loan size. But just what is loan size? This paper discusses seven aspects of loan size, each of which affects not only depth of outreach but also profitability. The seven aspects are: term to maturity, dollars disbursed, average balance, dollars per installment, time between installments, number of instal...

This paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households’ borrowing from informal sources in village economies. It uses a unique household level panel data set, which spans more than two decades (1987–2008), from rural Bangladesh. We find that households’ access to microfinance reduces the incidence of borrowing from informal sources, but not the amount of borrowing. We find t...

not small savers—defined here as the half of all savings clients of a microfinance institution (MFI) with the smallest deposit account balances— contribute to or undermine the sustainability of the MFI. MFI sustainability has long been accorded a place of central importance in microfinance for reasons that are well known. Perhaps because of the necessary focus of microfinance for so many years ...

Microfinance institutions have long recognized that providing women with access to loans empowers them in a number of ways. However, different microfinance service delivery models have been tested in various socioeconomic and cultural circumstances with varying results. This article highlights two major models: Group Guarantee Lending and Community Managed Loan Funds. It gives an overview of th...

The idea and implementation of Microfinance has become a hot topic and is currently at the central stage in debates on poverty alleviation. Microfinance can be defined as the sustainable delivery of financial services to the poor that aims at creating a world in which as many poor households as possible, have access to a suitable range of financial services (Christen, Rosenberg and Jayadeva, 20...

A wide range of supervised classification algorithms have been successfully applied for credit scoring in non-microfinance environments according to recent literature. However, credit scoring in the microfinance industry is a relatively recent application, and current research is based, to the best of our knowledge, on classical statistical methods. This lack is surprising since the implementat...

Different countries have implemented various methods in their poverty elimination programs. Redistribution policies, financing low income groups, subsidizing, enhancing the capabilities of the poor, and… are among the traditional policies for poverty elimination programs. The study of concept of poverty is always one of the most important considerations in Islamic thoughts. Islamic Shariat wit...

The Reserve Bank of India and a closely associated institution, NABARD, have undertaken a wide range of activities designed to support microfinance. However, many of these have been "developmental" initiatives of a financially repressive nature (such as directed credit requirements and refinancing of loans to priority sectors) and have not contributed to the emergence of a sustainable microfina...