Great Expectations: Microfinance and Poverty Reduction in Asia and Latin America

By John Weiss, Heather Montgomery. 2005

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are often seen by aid practitioners as a manifestly effective means of improving the position of the poor. Despite this widely held view, detailed research studies have been much more guarded about the impact of MFIs. In particular, several studies have raised doubts about the effectiveness of MFIs in reaching the “core poor”. This paper surveys the evidence from Asia and Latin America and contrasts experiences in the two regions. Studies on the former have been carried out more “rigorously”, but in both regions the evidence that microfinance is reaching the core poor is very limited.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78c205d8e2688343180e07842b852b4577b50bd8

Citations in the corpus

• Microfinance and household poverty reduction:: New evidence from India (2010, unknown): “However, some studies have shown that MFIs have not reached the poorest of the poor in Asian countries (Weiss and Montgomery, 2005) or in Bolivia”
• Depth of outreach and financial sustainability of microfinance institutions (2012, unknown): “Accordingly, Aubert et al. (2009), Hisako (2009) and Weiss and Montgomery (2005) argue that MFIs that were committed to lending to the very poor have had to gradually decrease their depth of outreach and increase the share of large loans in response to competition from new profit oriented MFIs.”