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The Handbook of Microfinance showcases an expansive collection of works from leading academics and field practitioners. In an attempt to understand the enormous gap between the limited number of clients that are currently benefiting from microfinance services, and the huge number of potential clients that are not, the selected contributions in this comprehensive handbook have one common thread: the prevailing mismatch between demand by clients of microfinance institutions and potential clients selecting themselves out for their demand for a wider array of financial products which is not being met.The scope of the book is wide, and explores successes and failures, main challenges and debates, methodologies for impact evaluation via random trials, leading trends in Asia versus Latin America, main efforts in Africa, the importance of value chains in Central America, ethical and gender issues, savings, microinsurance, governance, commercialization trends and the potential advantages and disadvantages of it. This exhaustive Handbook also features main lessons from informal finance and 19th-century credit cooperatives addressing the above-mentioned mismatch.
The book is a contemporary compilation of important research in the area of microfinance and financial inclusion. It explores a plurality of views and experiences from different parts of the world while linking a variety of international research backgrounds. Accordingly the book will fill a gap in providing a carefully curated cross-sectorial selection of topics relevant to the development finance research community primarily but also industry practitioners who are interested in keeping abreast of developing research. Benefits in this regard also include being able to provide a platform to less established researchers offering them a voice in published form.
Financial inclusion through microfinance has become a powerful force in improving the living conditions of poor farmers, rural non-farm enterprises and other vulnerable groups. In its unique ability to link the existing extensive network of India’s rural bank branches with the Self Help Groups (SHG), the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has covered up to 97 million poor households by March 2010 under its Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme. Policy-makers have proclaimed SHGs as ‘‘the most potent initiative ... for delivering financial services to the poor in a sustainable manner." This book presents a comprehensive scientific assessment of the impact of th...
The financial crisis and its economic and political aftermath have changed the ways that many anthropologists approach economic activities, institutions and systems. This insightful volume presents important elements of this change. With topics ranging from the relationship of states and markets to the ways that anthropologists’ political preferences and assumptions harm their work, the book presents cogent statements by younger and established scholars of how existing research areas can be extended and the new avenues that ought to be pursued.
This timely Handbook collates a range of evidence from top scholars in the field to help readers understand who microfinance reaches, how it helps, and why clients come back. It offers updated views on important concepts that enable a broader framework for understanding poverty and the corresponding financial needs of poor households.
Based on cutting-edge research by an interdisciplinary team of academics and policy analysts, this insightful and timely book considers the role of great power competition in what has come to be known as gray zone conflict. Taking the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a backdrop for some of its critical evaluation, it also examines US and NATO approaches to the management of escalation in asymmetric conflicts, and proposes innovative tools for managing crises in the future.
A major source of financing for the poor and no longer a niche industry Over the past four decades, microfinance—the provision of loans, savings, and insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs shut out of traditional capital markets—has grown from a niche service in Bangladesh and a few other countries to a significant global source of financing. Some 200 million people globally now receive support from microfinance institutions, with most of the recipients in the developing world. In the beginning, much of the microfinance industry was managed by non-governmental organizations, but today the majority of these institutions are commercial and regulated by governments, and they provid...
Critically reviewing major factors that disrupt local and regional development, Mustafa Dinc provides a transparent interpretation of the circular and cumulative relationship between these disruptions and development, highlighting ways to help interrupt this cycle. The book emphasizes the role and responsibility of individuals in the development process by exploring a humanist approach to local and regional development.
Tourism is integral to local, regional and national development policies; as a major global economic sector, it has the potential to underpin economic growth and wider development. Yet, transformations in both the nature of tourism and the dynamic environment within which it occurs give rise to new questions with regards to its developmental role. This Research Agenda offers a state-of-the-art review of the research into the tourism-development nexus. Exploring issues including governance, policy, philanthropy, poverty reduction and tourism consumption, it identifies significant gaps in the literature, and proposes new and sometimes provocative avenues for future research.