This paper describes important trade-offs that microfinance practitioners, donors, and regulators navigate. Drawing evidence from large, global surveys of microfinance institutions, the authors find a basic tension between meeting social goals and maximizing financial performance. For example,...

Foreign bank participation has increased steadily across developing countries since the mid-1990s. This paper documents this trend and surveys the existing literature to explore the drivers and consequences of this phenomenon, paying particular attention to the differences observed across...

Although Kenya's financial system is by far the largest and most developed in East Africa and its stability has improved significantly over the past years, many challenges remain. This paper assesses the stability, efficiency, and outreach of Kenya's banking system, using aggregate, bank-level,...

This paper combines firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure, and uses two estimation approaches. It finds that in low-income countries, labor growth is swifter in countries with a higher level of private credit/gross domestic product; the positive...

This paper describes a new index of the quality of the business environment for microfinance institutions (the Global Microscope on the Microfinance Business Environment). Regressions are used to validate the index by linking it and its subcomponents to microfinance outcomes. The main findings...

This paper uses data from a large survey of Chinese firms to investigate whether local government efforts to facilitate market development improve firm efficiency. Both government provision of information about products, markets, and innovation and government assistance in arranging loans are...

In recent years there has been a rapid increase in the presence and growth of greenfield microfinance institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses regressions to benchmark those African greenfields relative to other microfinance providers and finds that greenfields grew faster in terms of...

Using a new and representative data set of Chinese household finance, this paper documents household access to and costs of finance, along with their correlates. As in most developing countries, informal finance is a crucial element of household finance, and wealth tends to be associated with...

Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. This paper uses proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions between 2005 and 2009, jointly serving 80.1 million borrowers, to calculate the costs of...

Microfinance institutions have proved the possibility of providing reliable banking services to poor customers. Their second aim is to do so in a commercially-viable way. This paper analyzes the tensions and opportunities of microfinance as it embraces the market, drawing on a data set that...