Macro impact of microcredit.
详细信息
文摘
Economists and policy analysts have long sought to determine the cause and thereby the cure for poverty in under-developed regions of the world. One solution is the concept of microcredit. It is a program that gives small loans to extremely poor people for income-generating activities allowing them to become self-reliant. Microcredit was institutionalized by Mohammad Yunus with the creation of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976. For his efforts, he received the Nobel Peace Prize on October 13, 2006. Almost 76 million people have received credit from 2500 institutions in over 101 countries.;Despite the attention, the actual impact on development and poverty alleviation has not been measured. Existing literature has focused on the amount of loans disbursed, the rate of repayment and the number of recipients. Empirical analysis and case studies have indicated that microcredit directly benefits the individual recipient and their household.;The importance of institutions, the village community, and the informal economic sector has not been taken into consideration. Microcredit recipients tend to work in the informal economy, limiting their own economic development and hampering tax collection for the provision of public goods. There has been no analysis of the impact of microcredit loans on the economy on the whole.;This dissertation focuses on filling this gap and evaluating the macroeconomic impact of microcredit. Field research was conducted in West Bengal India to determine the effect of microcredit on recipients and also in comparison with non-recipients in their villages. The objective of the empirical analysis is to test if microcredit recipients has any significant positive impact on aggregate macro-level variables in the village. The results of this dissertation provide policy implications for analysts as well as microcredit providers and improve our understanding of microcredit as a poverty-alleviation tool.