This paper presents an overview of microfinance and microfinance research. The objective is to show that microfinance research has come full circle: from policies to lending methodologies and to organizations in the 1990s, and back to a focus on policies. Specifically, developments in the...

This paper describes different types of rural microfinance institutions, and examines their comparative advantages as well as related challenges to and strategies for deepening rural financial systems. The focus is not about which type of institution is better or worse for a particular target...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of access to credit and safety nets on fertilizer adoption in rural Ethiopia. Design/methodology/approach – A panel data set collected in 2005 and 2007 on 278 households and over 5,700 plots from the Southern Highlands of...

Purpose – Informal credit markets are very active in many developing countries, including China. Informal financial associations have become a major channel of borrowing. Using data from the 2006 Rural Household Survey, the purpose of this paper is to investigate farmers' borrowing choices...

Purpose – This paper explored factors that impact insurance choices of demand (farmers) and supply (insurance companies) side, respectively. Design/methodology/approach – Specially designed survey questions allow one to fully observe the demand tendency from farmers and partially observe the...

Purpose – Internationally, microfinance run by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is often considered an important approach to meeting the credit demand of rural households, particularly among the poor. However, the perceived competitions with formal financial institutions and concerns...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of temperature-based weather derivatives (WD) in reducing risk exposure for Chinese agriculture industry. Therefore, a put option with cumulated growing degree days as its underlying index is assumed to be bought by farmers as a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper aims to explore how borrower and group‐level characteristics affect repayment decisions of group borrowers by highlighting the case of rural credit cooperatives (RCCs) in Guizhou province in Southwest China. Design/methodology/approach – The Logit model...

Purpose – Maize production in China is exposed to pronounced yield risks, in particular weather risk, which is one of the most important and least controllable sources of risk in agriculture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which weather index-based insurance can...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that determine non-farm enterprise revenue and to empirically test the association between access to credit, credit source and firm performance among poor entrepreneurs in rural Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach Using a Bangladesh...