Doing business with the poor: the rules and impact of the microfinance institutions

Wajid Khan, Sun Shaorong and Ikram Ullah

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, 2017, vol. 30, issue 1, 951-963

Abstract: Of the total global population, at least 14.5% are living on less than $1.25 a day, 34% of the females in the least developed countries are unable to complete their primary education, and some 805 million are believed to be food insecure. To bring these numbers into accordance with the Millennium Development Goals, there are at least a dozen of different programmes operating around the world. Microcredit, being one of those programmes, is considered superior to the rest for being the only participatory approach and for being general enough to cater for a number of policy interventions. Microcredit or credit to the poor is provided under two very different mechanisms; the welfarist mechanism and the institutionalist mechanism. Each of these mechanisms has its advocates, as well as, its critics. The current paper empirically evaluates the two approaches in a systematic way. By using purposively collected data from the North West Pakistan and vigorous methodologies, we show that commercialization of microfinance institutions has indeed shifted the focus from either poverty reduction or women’s empowerment. Instead, the focus is now on more secure and profitable advances. Moreover, we also show that the welfarist approach in eradicating poverty and empowering women is superior to the now popular financial system approach.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1331677X.2017.1314790 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:reroxx:v:30:y:2017:i:1:p:951-963

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rero20

DOI: 10.1080/1331677X.2017.1314790

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja is currently edited by Marinko Skare

More articles in Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().