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The Economics of Microfinance

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Microfinance has become one of the most important mechanisms for the development of informal business in developing economies. As such, it has attracted attention from development practitioners, economists and politicians. Disappointingly, most books on the subject can be best described as infomercials - rarely do they go beyond success stories of happy women in brightly coloured clothes who are now running home enterprises. But practitioners know that there is far more to microfinance than simply providing loans - just as there is far more to development than simply pouring money into a country. There are pitfalls to microfinance: it can crowd out local business, it can catapult poor people further into poverty if incorrectly adminstered, and there are a host of governance issues surrounding it.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the economics of microfinance, as the title suggests. It is a technical book: it expects a high level of economic understanding, but it synthesises a vast amount of information on the subject and communicates it succintly. This is without a doubt one of the best technical economics books I have read - and I have read an awful lot of them.

I've given this book to my PhD students working in this area as essential background reading before they commence research. I commend this book to any economist or development practitioner who is interested in the economics behind the stories and photos, who want to find solutions that will really catalyse economic development, who want to see successful projects implemented and who want to learn from the expertise of others to make sure they do the best for their clients.

Microfinance is one of the newest strategies for development and Princeton economist Morduch takes a look at how it impacts societies. While he only looks briefly at the social issues he makes several compelling economic arguments for why we should consider microfinance as a viable option. The book is very well written although I think it does leave out some of the long term structural and institutional changes that need to be addressed. This is a field where new research comes out every day but Morduch's book is likely to be a staple for a very long time. This is a must have for anyone studying microfinance and will be for a long time to come.

Microfinance is most famous as microlending, whose most famous representative is Bangladesh's Grameen Bank. Grameen, and its founder Mohammad Yunus, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their aid to the poor. The idea, with which most people are probably familiar, is that the bank loans some of the world's most destitute people small amounts of money -- $100 or less, typically -- for some vital bit of capital. Borrowers might use the money to buy a sewing machine, for instance, which they can then use to produce far more clothing than they had produced by hand. Grameen's default rate has been remarkably low -- "the poor always pay back", to use the phrase from Grameen II.

The economic logic here is actually revealing as a study of what's unspoken in economic logic, hence how misleading economic postulates are. "All else being equal" (such a magical phrase), the first bit of capital that I get will yield more benefits to me than the second bit. Assuming I'm rational, I will spend the first money I get on more-productive capital, then spend subsequent bits on less productive capital. That is, the marginal returns to capital are decreasing (or at least nonincreasing). Hence, if I'm a rational bank and all else is equal, I should be more willing to lend to the poor than to the wealthy: I'll get a greater return from lending that little bit of capital.

Needless to say, that's not how it works: Citibank is in no rush to lend to Bangladeshi farmers. Why not? Obviously it's because all else is not equal. Among many other things, Citibank relies on the vast infrastructure provided by advanced capitalist economies: before they loan to me, they check with credit-reporting agencies that have a special competence validating people's reputations. Those credit-reporting agencies can follow me around because I was born with a number, namely a Social Security Number, which I can't escape from without some work. Hence the infrastructure beneath me makes it hard for me to default on a loan without other banks noticing. This infrastructure is missing from Bangladesh. Consequently, the cost of gathering all the necessary information about a loan applicant is much higher -- transaction costs per dollar of loan are astronomical if the loans are administered in the way that Citibank specializes in.

Grameen handles this in a novel way, for which they're justly famous. It's called "group lending": in Classic Grameen, they loan to groups of five people. If any one of the applicants defaults, the others are forbidden from ever receiving loans again. The informational burden is transferred from the bank onto the applicants.

Can't those five people conspire to default on loans together? Yes, they surely can, and here we run into another difficulty of the classic economic picture. If they cut and run on a loan, they could run to another microlender and get another loan -- and so on for as long as they want, so long as the microlenders don't share information. The more microlenders that service a given area, the more challenging this problem becomes. So competition actually works against microlenders here, by making collusion possible. To solve this problem, microlenders need a set of institutions that make validating reputations less costly. Credit-reporting agencies would help, as would the whole arsenal of Western identity policies. Which isn't to say that those are the only systems that will solve microlenders' problems, by any means; just as group lending is a novel approach to the developing world's specific problems, so we might expect them to land on different solutions to the reputation problem.

The Economics of Microfinance is filled with interesting discoveries like this. It starts with a less-developed form of microlending, namely the Rotating Savings and Credit Association, evolves through group lending, and discusses where Grameen and its ilk (BRAC et al.) are today. Most interesting for me was microsaving, as opposed to microlending. The poor often need savings accounts more than they need loans. Indeed, they are willing to receive negative interest rates on their money, just to ensure that the money stays in a safe place. Armendáriz and Morduch give a remarkable example: in certain rural villages, savings collectors will offer to take money out of the villagers' hands, hold it for a time, take a fee, and return the now-smaller pile of money. Presumably this negative interest rate is less negative than the alternative, namely theft or neighbors begging for a loan. Microsaving is most often used to keep money away from husbands, according to Armendáriz and Morduch. Indeed, microfinance generally is most associated with rural women; they constitute an overwhelming percentage of Grameen's (and other microbanks') client base.

By the end of the book, however, it's not clear that anyone can quantify the value of microfinance programs. Would those who participate in microfinance have done just as well without it? To gauge the actual impact of microfinance, one needs to answer that sort of counterfactual -- which is, for obvious reasons, difficult if not impossible. There's also a problem of what we're modeling: if we're trying to quantify, say, small-business growth before and after the introduction of a microfinance program, that's one thing, and is relatively easy to answer. If we're trying to measure empowerment of women, that's quite another, and it's not at all clear that we even know how to start measuring that. Should we measure it, for instance, by the rate of reported domestic violence? Empowerment may increase reporting rates. It may also cause a shift in the balance of power at home, which may increase violence.

The difficulties are manifest, as Armendáriz and Morduch are well aware. The great virtue of this book is that it doesn't shy away from pointing out areas of ignorance and future challenges. Anyone interested in how microfinance actually works -- and how one would actually measure its success -- cannot avoid reading this book.

After reading "Banker to the Poor," I was interested in getting a bit more of an unbiased view of the subject of microfinance. The authors' views are clear and concise about each topic, plus they offer lots of other sources for the information. While it is obviously intended as s textbook, this book is a great way to teach yourself about the theory and empirical studies about microfinance.
I could not have chosen a better book than this one.

To those that, as i am, have an Economics background and are just grasping the all immense universe that microfinance is becoming, this book opens perspectives and clears some very important issues. Issues such as the value of interest charging or the many different ways there actually are to build a microfinance initiative or the value of professional dedication to make it an effective and efficient working and sustainable intervention ... A must have!

I've consulted a number of books on microfinance and found this to be one of the most intelligent, cogent sources of info on the field. Particularly impressive is the clearly written, even handed views on oft debated subjects (e.g. the role of subsidy in microfinance). Highly recommended.

The first three chapters lay down the causes and characteristics of market failure in the finance context, give economic explation fot them, and describe the history of microfinance. I found Chapters 4 and 5 ("Group Lenging" and "Beyond Group Lending" respectively) extremely useful for applied contract theorists.

The word "microcredit" refers manly to lending. In Chapter 6 ("Savings and Insurance"), the authors introduce another concepts: savings and insurance. In the following chapters to the end, they go on to various issues such as gender and goverment subsidy.

Overall, the book is an excellent survey of microfinace as it is. Yet, it lacks a big picture, especially regarding the future of microfinance. Whether the human society can keep microfinance on the sound truck will probably matter in the first order sense to how much human beings as a whole can prosper in the 21st century. My own guess is that key to the success will be a good combination of self-interest and sympathy to others, which is exactly the spirit of Adam Smith.

It is well-written in a way that it present the materials clearly in words and in mathematical formula. If you don't have much apetite for quant, you can still skip those formula and won't get lost in between chapters.

The questions raised at the end of the chapter is inspiring. It really let you think beyond what you've just read.

This book provides a splendid overview of what economists have learned so far about micro-finance. The book requires some knowledge of economics and econometrics, but most of it can be read and understood even with just the kind of background a good econ undergraduate will have.

The field is developing quickly, and so there are already several contributions which are not covered (see e.g. work that folks such as Dean Karlan and coauthors are doing), but overall the coverage is excellent for what had been done until the publication date.

Those who think that micro-finance is "clearly" the way ahead, and that its history has been only a history of great successes, will find some surprises here. I do love the idea underlying micro-finance, but it turns out that some of the media hype is not supported by careful studies.

Still the field deserves to be studied, and this book is a highly recommended overview, which will also give you plenty of references to deepen your knowledge and to identify area that need research.