Does Microfinance Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? New Evidence from Household Panel Data

Katsushi Imai and Md Azam

No DP2010-24, Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University

Abstract: The purpose of the present study is to examine whether microfinance reduces poverty in Bangladesh drawing upon the nationally representative household panel data covering 4 rounds from 1997 to 2005. A special attention was drawn to the issue of endogeneity by applying treatment effects model and propensity score matching (PSM) for the participants and non-participants of microfinance programmes. It has been found by treatment effects model applied to panel data that the simple household access to general loans from microfinance institutions (MFIs) did not increase per capita household income significantly, but household access to loans for productive purposes from MFIs significantly increased per capita household income. This suggests that the purpose and monitoring of how clients use the loans is important for increasing household income, and thus decreasing household poverty. However, the application of treatment effects model and PSM to each cross-sectional component of the panel data shows that the poverty reducing effect of MFI on poverty was significantly reduced over the years. This suggests the importance of more attention to the primary purpose of microcredit, that is, poverty reduction, and also to monitoring loan usages in the situations where the profits of MFIs became increasingly squeezed and their activities became more commercialised under severe competitions among MFIs in recent years.

Keywords: microfinance; MFI (microfinance institution); Microcredit; Poverty; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C30 C31 G21 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2010-09, Revised 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mfd
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2010-24.pdf Revised version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Microfinance Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? New Evidence from Household Panel Data (2011)
Working Paper: Does Microfinance Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? New Evidence from Household Panel Data (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2010-24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University 2-1 Rokkodai, Nada, Kobe 657-8501 JAPAN. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office of Promoting Research Collaboration, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University ().