Microfinance Overview : From Simple Loans to Complex Systems

Financial services for the poor have existed since early ages and have been evolving from simple transactions to the nowadays microfinance sophisticated products and complex markets. However, despite the steady progress of microfinance, many issues still need to be addressed, and the microfinance, as a part of the economic scheme, has proven its requirement for new approaches and studies which would embrace the development of its structures. In this context, the present work gives, at first, an overview of the evolution of microfinance, its trends and main issues. Then, an approach of microfinance as a complex system is presented with regards to the state of the art of the complexity theory. Finally, this paper discusses the relevance of agent-based modeling in microfinance and provides a number of existing microfinance agent-based models