A poverty penalty arises when the poor pay more than the non-poor to access goods and services. An example is the cost to access credit. While still high, microcredit interest rates are lower than the interest rates charged by moneylenders. Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) usually justify the...

Microfinance is increasingly seen as a major development tool. Its promise to help the poor by providing financial services is seen as the major reason for its support. Nevertheless, its effectiveness on actual poverty reduction is not yet clear and therefore it generates some unresolved ethical...

Poverty is multidimensional. In its starkest form, the United Nations Development Annual Reports proxy poverty as combined low levels of income, health, and education. Microfinance, on the other hand, addresses directly the income dimension of poverty, and indirectly health and education....

This paper aims at gaining deeper understanding of the possible effects of combined microfinance (CMF) on social and economic performance outcomes. By means of a case-study on the City of Bridgetown (COB), one of the leading credit unions in Barbados, it explores the possible limits, challenges...

Documented deficiencies in traditional social transfer mechanisms have led to the emergence of alternative methods for reducing poverty. In many countries, microfinance institutions (MFIs) have become popular instruments for redistributive pro-poor policies. While microcredit programmes have...

International capital flows are constrained by a lack of complementary human capital, information asymmetries and transaction costs for small loan sizes. Extant research has provided a myriad of economic and cultural explanations of how microcredit has overcome these. Based on these, the paper...