Microbanks: Ownership, performance and social tradeoffs - a global analysis

Roy Mersland and R. Øystein Strøm

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Suppliers of microfinance are typically Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), cooperatives or specialized microfinance institutions incorporated as Shareholder Firms (SHFs). Leaving out the cooperatives we study whether NGOs and SHFs differ in bringing along social benefit to their clients. Specifically, is there a trade-off between different dimensions of social benefits, and can these tradeoffs predict ownership type? To frame the comparison of NGOs and SHFs we make use of Schreiner’s (2002) framework for discussion of the social benefits of microfinance. A self constructed dataset with unusually high-quality rating information from 132 NGOs and 68 SHFs in 53 countries is used to carry out the statistical tests. Our findings indicate that SHFs and NGOs are more similar than different. Our hypothesis that NGOs are more socially oriented than SHFs is rejected. SHFs’ benefit in scale and scope seems not related to ownership, but to legal constraints impeding NGOs to mobilize savings. Our second conclusion is that we cannot find a trade-off among outreach variables. Specifically, the return on assets is higher in NGOs. We conclude that ownership doesn’t influence the performance of microfinance organizations. Our conclusion is in line with findings in the general banking industry.

Keywords: Microfinance; outreach tradeoffs; transformation; commercialization; ownership; corporate governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-01-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2063/1/MPRA_paper_2063.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/3966/1/MPRA_paper_3966.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:2063

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().