This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed to examine the extent to which households are...

The objective of IFPRI's multicountry research program on rural financial policies for food security of the poor is to identify policies and institutional arrangements that help the poor integrate themselves into sustainable savings and credit systems such that they have an increased capacity to...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed to examine the extent to which households are...

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops. In the past,...

The paper investigates the impact of credit constraints on the adoption of hybrid maize among rural households in Malawi using the treatment-effects model. Results reveal that after effectively correcting for endogeneity, credit constraints have a reducing effect on the size of land allocated to...

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops. In the past, hybrid...

This paper investigates the impact of credit constraints on the adoption of hybrid maize among rural households in Malawi. To address the endogenous and binary nature of the household's credit constraints status, we employ a treatment-effects model to consistently estimate the effect of credit...

Two common approaches are used for measuring household access to credit and credit constraints in the literature. The first method infers the presence of credit constraints from violations of the assumptions of the life cycle/permanent income hypothesis. ...The second method uses direct...

Joint liability group lending is currently the lending technology of choice of microfinance institutions because of the success of the Grameen Bank, which is using the technology to successfully lend to millions of poor Bangladeshi women. The analysis and findings presented in this brief are the...

The paper departs from the standard practice that takes the estimated marginal effects of either the amount of credit received or membership in a credit program as measures of the impact of access to credit on household welfare. The marginal effects of the formal credit limit variable on...