There has been a growing existence of informal financial institutions in both rural and urban areas of South Africa. The objective of this paper is to identify factors influencing the choice of informal financial service providers in the peri-urban areas of South Africa. Data from 193...

There has been a growing existence of informal financial institutions in both rural and urban areas of South Africa. The objective of this paper is to identify factors influencing the choice of informal financial service providers in the peri-urban areas of South Africa. Data from 193...

Rural financial intermediation faces several challenges, including, shortcomings and systematic weaknesses of rural financial markets, urban biased policies and poorly designed interventions not based on the realities of rural markets. Against this background the purpose of this chapter is to...

Interest rates are a topical subject in the micro lending industry in South Africa. The micro lending industry has been accused of charging usurious interest and exploiting the consumers. This has led to the Department of Trade and Industry passing a Usury Act with an aim of protecting the...

Community banking initiatives are defined in this paper as membership based decentralized and self-help financial institutions. Under this broad definition we discuss the informal variants of community banks, the rotating savings and credit association (or in South Africa better known as the...

A partial-observability model finds evidence of racial discrimination by retailers of consumer durables in apartheid South Africa. In particular, black households are 13 percentage points more likely to demand a hire/purchase loan but not to have one supplied than are other households, all else...

Interest rates are a topical subject in the micro lending industry in South Africa. The micro lending industry has been accused of charging usurious interest and exploitating the consumers. This has led to the Department of Trade and Industry passing a Usury Act with an aim of protecting the...

Censored (Tobit) regression is used to estimate the effects of race, location of residence, and sex of the household head on formal debt held by South African households. The magnitude of the effects suggests that lenders discriminate and that formal financial markets could be improved even...