Village Funds and Access to Finance in Rural Thailand

This paper examines whether recently introduced “village funds”, one of the largestmicrofinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds areanalyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find,first, that they reach the target group of lower income households better than formal financialinstitutions. Second, village funds provide loans to those kinds of borrowers which tend to becustomers of informal financial institutions.[...]