Savings and Credit Unions (SCUs), a type of self-help group, have been rapidly forming in Laotian villages since the early 2000s.This paper investigates their characteristics, activities, and exogenous determinants of their activity based on an original questionnaire survey.It presents a...

Based on original household survey on the six villages in Vientiane vicinity in 2005, the paper investigates the impact of Savings and Credit Union (SCU) programs on household income, expenditure and asset, applying the methodology of Coleman's (1999) study on Thailand to address placement bias...

A recent issue in the microfinance literature is whether microfinance institutions (MFIs) are financially sustainable without a subsidy as a prerequisite for competition policy or commercialization processes. Although some recent studies have proposed relevant theoretical frameworks, empirical...