Micro-finance and inclusive financial systems in Latin America.
详细信息
文摘
The search for the best way to create opportunity and sustainable development in the less privileged parts of the world has brought about initiatives to overcome poverty and marginalization, and to build more inclusive social, economic and financial systems. Among a multitude of initiatives, micro-finance, by now a familiar concept, has only recently come to the attention of the development field. The contemporary version of micro-finance traces its origins to 1974, via the innovative initiative of Dr. Muhammad Yunus in starting the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, for which he went on to win the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2006. Yunus showed that micro-finance held the promise of providing financial services for those individuals otherwise considered unworthy and unprofitable by the traditional financial sector. The introduction of micro-finance in Latin America, where poverty has grown to reach over fifty percent of the population in multiple nations, has developed in varying stages among countries of the region. The question then is whether micro-finance is a viable option to reduce such levels of poverty. The goal of this paper is to show that micro-finance can be an effective element in poverty reduction efforts, but it must be accompanied by an enabling political environment and regulatory framework. An analysis of the Argentine experience in micro-credit serves to elucidate this point. Moreover, the paper analyzes the recent formalization trend in the micro-credit field, arguing for the importance of maintaining micro-finance's social mission in the face of increasing expansion and commercialization, if micro-finance is to have a true impact on poverty reduction. The research for this thesis, based on two years of field work in the villas miserias of the Buenos Aires province in Argentina, aims finally to explore the role of micro-credit in building more inclusive financial systems, in order to evaluate its impact on the goal to decrease marginalization and poverty.