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Microfinance has grown from the obscure efforts of a few philanthropic institutions into a global industry that reaches 150-200 million clients through the branches of thousands of institutions. Microfinance has matured from exclusively funding loans to providing savings, insurance, healthcare, and education. Yet many people still think of it narrowly as microcredit. Understanding remains thin of what the industry does, how it functions and why.Introduction to Microfinance provides a non-technical introduction to the broad array of inclusive financial and non-financial services for the world's poor. It explores the financial lives of those families, and the microfinance institutions and rapidly growing industry that serve them. Written in close collaboration with college students for college students, under the auspices of one of the US's leading undergraduate programs in microfinance, it is the first-ever introductory college textbook about microfinance.What is microfinance? What are its methods and why? Does it work? What are its prospects and challenges? Why is it controversial? This book tackles these questions and more.
In most Asian countries, there exists a dynamic informal financial sector working side by side with formal finance, which has not until now been researched carefully. Informal Finance is based on a research project that examined informal finance in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The issues encountered in studying each country are discussed, as are regional diversity within countries and the differences between rural and urban areas. Rather than simply summarizing the five country studies on which it is based, Informal Finance presents a synthesis based on a common framework that permits cross-country comparisons.
The purpose of the 'Microfinance Handbook' is to bring together in a single source guiding principles and tools that will promote sustainable microfinance and create viable institutions.
What guidance does academic research really provide to economic policy development? The critical and analytical surveys in this volume investigate links between policies and outcomes by surveying work from broad macroeconomic policies to interventions in microfinance. Asserting that there are no universal correspondences between policies and outcomes, contributors demonstrate instead that only an intense familiarity with the development context and the universe of applicable economic models can generate successful policies. Getting cause-and-effect right is essential for policy design and implementation. With the goal of drawing researchers and policy makers closer, this volume highlights our increasing understanding of ways to combine economic theorizing with careful, thoughtful empirical work. - Presents an accurate, self-contained survey of the current state of the field - Summarizes the most recent discussions, and elucidates new developments - Although original material is also included, the main aim is the provision of comprehensive and accessible surveys
Vietnam's rapid growth has transformed the country, reducing poverty from about 75 percent of the population to about 50 percent. At the same time, its transition from a planned to a market economy has created new challenges for public policy in a wide range of areas. This volume explores issues such as which macroeconomic and structural reforms led to growth, what effect reform has had on the household economy, and how the transition has affected education, health, fertility, and child nutrition. It provides an analysis of economic and social policies and shows how micro-level data can be used to analyze the likely effect of different government expenditures and activities. It also focuses on the effect different policies have on the poor and challenges stereotypes about poverty-focused expenditures.
This dissertation endeavours to shed light on the paradox of the persistence of informal finance in urban African markets despite the emergence of a vibrant microfinance sector. To do so, it analyses the rationale of the financial choices of the micro-entrepreneurs operating in the markets of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). In particular, a careful examination of the motives driving the combinative use of informal and formal microfinance is carried. In order to lay deep theoretical foundations to this analysis, this thesis develops a model describing the financial behaviour of the micro-entrepreneurs in the presence of hyperbolic preferences and social influences. The solution of this model shows, inter alia, that the financial choices are not solely driven by economic motivations but also by social motivations. This result is confirmed by empirical observations which show, among other things, that social relations play an important role in explaining the persistence of informal finance. Besides, it appeared also that the combinative use of informal finance and microfinance can be explained, on the one side, by the fact that the motives driving the demand for informal and for formal finance are not always the same and, on the other side, by the fact that these two types of financial mechanisms are more likely to be used as complements than as substitutes. Ultimately, this thesis unfolds a new perspective for apprehending the coexistence of informal and formal microfinance. Informal finance is no longer considered as a makeshift, but as an integral part of the financial landscape of the Sub-Saharan urban financial markets. Therefore, microfinance institutions and policy makers ought to adopt a more positive and pro-active attitude vis-à-vis informal finance.
A major source of financing for the poor and no longer a niche industry Over the past four decades, microfinance—the provision of loans, savings, and insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs shut out of traditional capital markets—has grown from a niche service in Bangladesh and a few other countries to a significant global source of financing. Some 200 million people globally now receive support from microfinance institutions, with most of the recipients in the developing world. In the beginning, much of the microfinance industry was managed by non-governmental organizations, but today the majority of these institutions are commercial and regulated by governments, and they provide safe places for the poor to save, as well as offering much-needed capital and other financial services. Now out of infancy, the microfinance industry faces major challenges, including its ability to deal with mobile banking and other technology and concerns that some markets are now over-saturated with microfinance. How the industry deals with these and other challenges will determine whether it will continue to grow or will be subsumed within the larger global financial sector. This book is based on the results of a workshop at Lehigh University among thirty-four leaders in the industry. The editors, working with contributions from more than a dozen leading authorities in the field, tell the important story of how microfinance developed, how it has met the needs of hundreds of millions of people, and they address key questions about how it can continue to meet those needs in the future.
Africa is home to some of the poorest and vulnerable populations in the world. The ten poorest countries in the world are in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest incidence and greatest depth of poverty in the world. Fewer than one in five adults in Africa has access to the services of a formal or semi-formal financial institution. Microfinance in Africa is growing, though. A broad range of diverse institutions offer financial services to the poor and low-income clients in Africa. These include non-governmental organizations, non-banking financial institutions, cooperatives, credit unions, rural banks, Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), postal financial institutions and an increasing number of commercial banks. Increasingly, technology is being used to expand microfinance outreach mobile phone banking is one such example. This book provides an overview of the microfinance sector in Africa, reviews the performance and impact of microfinance institutions in the region, and outlines some of the opportunities and challenges that African microfinance has on hand.
In 2011 the World Bank—with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—launched the Global Findex database, the world's most comprehensive data set on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. Drawing on survey data collected in collaboration with Gallup, Inc., the Global Findex database covers more than 140 economies around the world. The initial survey round was followed by a second one in 2014 and by a third in 2017. Compiled using nationally representative surveys of more than 150,000 adults age 15 and above in over 140 economies, The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution includes updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services. It has additional data on the use of financial technology (or fintech), including the use of mobile phones and the Internet to conduct financial transactions. The data reveal opportunities to expand access to financial services among people who do not have an account—the unbanked—as well as to promote greater use of digital financial services among those who do have an account. The Global Findex database has become a mainstay of global efforts to promote financial inclusion. In addition to being widely cited by scholars and development practitioners, Global Findex data are used to track progress toward the World Bank goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The database, the full text of the report, and the underlying country-level data for all figures—along with the questionnaire, the survey methodology, and other relevant materials—are available at www.worldbank.org/globalfindex.
Contributed papers presented earlier in a conference.