The Microfinance Illusion

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Microfinance as a Poverty Reduction Tool—A Critical Assessment (2009, background): “…take crucial market share away from local SMEs that might otherwise be able to reduce unit costs and register productivity growth in the long run” (Bateman and Chang, 2009, p. 7).10 Too many micro-enterprises due to a constant inflow of new MFI financed entrants cause ‘market saturation’, and a…”
High Noon for Microfinance Impact Evaluations: Re-investigating the Evidence from Bangladesh (2012, background): “However, Dichter and Harper (2007), Roy (2010), Bateman (2010), and Bateman and Chang (2009) argue that microfinance is neither always beneficial nor rigorously demonstrated.”
Does Microfinance Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? New Evidence from Household Panel Data (2012, background): “Moreover, as noted by Bateman and Chang (2009), microfinance neglects the crucial role of scale economies and produces an oversupply of inefficient micro-enterprises that could undermine the development of more efficient small and medium industries (SMEs) that would be potentially able to reduce…”
Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to Nemesis in Thirty Years (2012, background): “Section 3 then summarises the key areas where we feel the theory behind microfinance as opposed to its mere (possibly inefficient) execution, has proved to be 3 This article is a substantially revised and updated version of a 2009 mimeo (Bateman and Chang, 2009). most problematic.”