 Microfinance and the Challenge of Financial Inclusion for DevelopmentEnsayos Económicos, 2012, vol. 1, issue 67, 7-34 Abstract: Within a relatively short time, perhaps just a decade, microfinance has gone from being hero to zero in the development discourse: from being lauded as the silver bullet to solve the problems of development and poverty reduction, to being derided as the progenitor of financial instability and enhanced vulnerability among the poorest people. The mushrooming of microfinance institutions of both non-profit and profit varieties was very quickly followed by crises in many of the same developing countries that were earlier seen as the most prominent sites of success. In this context, it may well be argued that it is fine to reject microfinance as the means for either poverty reduction or economic diversification, but then how do policy makers address the problems of the exclusion of the poor from formal financial institutions? Since it is clearly not the silver bullet to solve development problems, microfinance needs to be treated as one small element of a broader set of financial strategies for development. Keywords: development; development banking; financial crisis; financial regulation and supervision; India; microcredit; microfinance; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bcr:ensayo:v:1:y:2012:i:67:p:7-34 Access Statistics for this article Ensayos Económicos is currently edited by Germán Feldman More articles in Ensayos Económicos from Central Bank of Argentina, Economic Research Department Contact information at EDIRC. |
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