Regional differences in the production processes of financial and social outputs of microfinance institutions

Thomas Bolli and Anh Vo Thi

The Economics of Transition, 2014, vol. 22, issue 3, 461-495

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="ecot12045-abs-0001">

This study uses panel data of microfinance institutions across the world to compare production processes across regions, assess the relevance of unobserved heterogeneity and estimate economies of scale. Comparing a financial production process to a multidimensional production process that accounts for the presence of outreach in the objective function suggests that financial and social output reflect complements in South Asia but not in other regions. Furthermore, we find substantial economies of scale for a pure financial production process. However, accounting for outreach lowers estimated economies of scale, suggesting that producing outreach creates high transaction costs and requires exploitation of local knowledge.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecot.2014.22.issue-3 (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:bla:etrans:v:22:y:2014:i:3:p:461-495

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0967-0750

Access Statistics for this article

The Economics of Transition is currently edited by Philippe Aghion and Wendy Carlin

More articles in The Economics of Transition from The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().