ABSTRACT Financial access is gradually being recognised as an important input to economic development. Using World Bank (2007) database, this study examines the extent of financial access in developed and developing countries. Further, it develops a new socio-economic development index which

The provision of wider access to formal financial services is increasingly becoming a focus of governments and monetary authorities. An issue that must be considered is whether or not such increased access jeopardises financial stability. This paper takes the view that the

Recent research on corporate governance has documented large differences between countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms, in the breadth and depth of financial markets, and in the access of firms to external finance. We suggest that there is a common element

and graphs, economic and financial modeling, theoretical and quantum chemistry, chemical process simulation, mathematics and statistics, and power networks). The collection meets a vital need that artificially-generated matrices cannot meet, and is widely used by the sparse matrix algorithms community

Group liability in microcredit purports to improve repayment rates through peer screening, monitoring, and enforcement. However, it may create excessive pressure, and discourage reliable clients from borrowing. Two randomized trials tested the overall effect, as well as specific mechanisms. The first removed group liability from pre-existing groups and the second randomly assigned villages to either group or individual liability loans. In both, groups still held weekly meetings. We find no increase in default and larger groups after three years in pre-existing areas, and no change in default but fewer groups created after two years in the expansion areas.

Several microfinance organizations have begun using a management tool, developed by Assessing the Impact of Microenterprise Services (AIMS) at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to assess impact. This tool recommends comparing veteran members to new members of a microcredit program, and attributes any difference to the impact of the program. The tool introduces a potential source of bias into estimates of impact by not instructing organizations to include program dropouts in their calculations. This paper uses data from a longitudinal study in Peru of Mibanco borrowers and non-borrowers to quantify some, but not all, of the biases in the cross-sectional approach. In these data, not including dropouts overestimates the impact of the credit program. Furthermore, we find that the sample composition shifted over the two years (i.e., the characteristics of those who join), introducing further bias into a cross-sectional impact assessment. Note that the “reestimates ” here are themselves biased and thus not a recommended procedure. They are calculated merely to assess the attrition and sample composition biases in a cross-sectional approach that compares veterans to new entrants to assess impact.

Notes: Center Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments.

This paper assesses the impact of increasing financial access on low-income people savings. Effects on households’ saving rates and on different informal savings instruments are considered. The paper uses an exogenous expansion of a Mexican savings institute, targeted to low-income people, as a

This Focus Note is the first in a series exploring various dilemmas which policy makers face across several topics of great importance to financial inclusion. 1 The focus is on protection of borrowers, specifically low income borrowers who are the current and potential clients of microfinance

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