Het microkrediet maakt de arme mensen nog veel armer.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 17:26 schreef Pool het volgende:
Bovendien leid ik uit de OP of het nieuwsbericht op geen enkele manier af dat het systeem zou falen.

Je moet niet vergeten dat welvaart alleen maar kan groeien als er een systeem is van kredietverlening, waardoor mensen geld kunnen lenen om risicovolle investeringen te kunnen doen in eigen bedrijfjes.

Voordat het microkrediet kwam, was zo'n structuur er helemaal niet, dus bleef de economische bedrjjvigheid op een onderontwikkeld niveau. Met microkrediet ís er tenminste krediet. Ook al is dat duur, blijkbaar wordt er wel gebruik van gemaakt.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 19:07 schreef Picchia het volgende:
Natuurlijk moet er wel enige voorlichting en selectie aan voorafgaan.

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A partial marvel

Jul 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Microcredit may not work wonders but it does help the entrepreneurial poor

MICROCREDIT looks like a miracle. It involves providing unsecured small loans to poor people in developing countries whom most banks would turn away. Yet these small borrowers almost always repay their loans (and the fairly steep interest charges) on time, which suggests that they find productive uses for the money. The industry’s backers make some big claims as a result: Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the father of microfinance, reckons that 5% of Grameen Bank’s clients exit poverty each year. Yet economists point out that there are surprisingly few credible estimates of the extent to which microcredit actually reduces poverty.

This would not matter too much if all microfinance funding were raised via the market (as an increasing proportion is). As long as investors were satisfied with their returns, there would be no cause for concern. Yet despite growing interest from private investors, 53% of the $11.7 billion that was committed to the microfinance industry in 2008 still came at below-market rates from aid agencies, multilateral banks and other donors. Given that there are other things that aid money could be spent on, and that the rationale for subsidising microcredit is its effectiveness as an anti-poverty tool, it is important for donors to know whether it has the advertised effects.

Measuring the impact of microcredit is complicated by the fact that the counterfactual—what would have happened to a person who borrowed from a microlender if he had not done so—cannot easily be tested. Many early studies compared borrowers with non-borrowers. But if borrowers are in any case more entrepreneurial than those who do not borrow, such comparisons are likely to overstate hugely the effect of microcredit.

Worries of this nature are not mere nitpicking. One study surveyed 1,800 families in rural Bangladesh and found that an impressive 62% of school-age sons of those who borrowed from Grameen Bank were in school, compared with 34% of the sons of non-borrowers. Advocates argued that this showed that microcredit helped increase school enrolment. But a comparison with people of similar backgrounds in villages without access to microcredit showed that the difference was because people who were already more likely to have children in school were also those who signed up for microcredit. Even comparisons between areas with and without microcredit may be misleading, because microlenders naturally choose to work in areas where their prospects of success are the greatest.

The pervasiveness of these self-selection issues has led researchers to devise experiments that allow them to ensure that participation in a programme is determined essentially by chance. Two new papers* apply this idea to measure the effect of access to microcredit. Researchers from the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worked with an Indian microfinance firm to ensure that 52 randomly chosen slums in the city of Hyderabad were given access to microfinance, while 52 other slums, which were equally suitable and where the lender was also keen to expand, were denied it. This allowed the researchers to see clearly the effect of microcredit on an entire community. Dean Karlan of Yale University and Jonathan Zinman of Dartmouth College carried out a similar exercise in the Philippines, this time at the level of the individual borrower. They tweaked the credit-scoring software of a microfinance firm so that only a random subset of people with marginal credit histories were accepted as clients. These clients could then be compared with those who sought credit but were denied it.

Broadly speaking, neither study found that microcredit reduced poverty. There was no effect on average household consumption, at least within a year to 18 months of the experiment. The study in the Philippines also measured the probability of being under the poverty line and the quality of food that people ate, and again found no effects. Microcredit may not even be the most useful financial service for the majority of poor people. Only one in five loans in the Hyderabad study actually led to the creation of a new business. Providing people with safe places to store their (small) savings may help them more in the long run.
Small and perfectly formed?

That said, microcredit did have discernible effects. In India, people in the slums that had access to microcredit were more likely to cut down on things like tobacco and alcohol in favour of durable goods (particularly items such as pushcarts or cooking pans that are used heavily by traders and food-stall owners). One reason average consumption failed to increase may therefore be that more people were diverting some of their own income into starting or expanding their businesses. Microcredit clearly allowed more people to overcome the barrier posed by start-up costs. The MIT researchers found that as many as one-third more businesses had opened in slums which had a microcredit branch. This may mean that even though there was no measurable impact on poverty during the study period, there may well be some over a longer time-frame as these businesses prosper.

Tiny loans are unlikely to be enough to allow these businesses to grow to an efficient scale, of course. But the role of microcredit in allowing people to signal their creditworthiness is valuable, especially if their success makes banks more willing to lend them larger sums and leads to even more economic activity. By being willing to take a risk on entrepreneurial sorts who lack any other way to start a business, microcredit may help reduce poverty in the long run, even if its short-run effects are negligible.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 19:50 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Ah ja The Economist... die vinden het belangrijker dat meer mensen ondernemer worden dan dat het de armoede aan pakt.. hoe voorspelbaar. in de hoop dat mensen ooit net zo rechts en liberaal als The Economist geraken

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Yet economists point out that there are surprisingly few credible estimates of the extent to which microcredit actually reduces poverty.

This would not matter too much if all microfinance funding were raised via the market (as an increasing proportion is). As long as investors were satisfied with their returns, there would be no cause for concern.

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Trap or treat

INTO a crowded field of books about the problems with development aid comes a slim new volume by Glenn Hubbard, who was the head of President George Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, and William Duggan, a colleague at Columbia Business School, where Mr Hubbard is now dean. Like many others, the two academics are disappointed by the failure of the existing system of aid to foster economic development in poor countries. But rather than advocating getting rid of the system altogether, they propose reorienting it to concentrate on promoting private businesses in poor countries. This, they argue, has been the key to economic development in countries that have grown fast, but it is only rarely the principal focus of development aid.

Of course, aid sometimes supports companies. Aid agencies gave Mohammad Yunus, the father of microfinance, some of the money he used to experiment with unsecured business loans to groups of poor Bangladeshi women. Microfinance has since become one of the highest-profile examples of an anti-poverty programme that works. But this sort of use of aid money is the exception rather than the rule. Although poor countries lack a dynamic private sector, there is often little will from either governments or aid agencies to help one grow and thrive. More importantly, the aid system is still not used to evaluating its projects in terms of the impact they have on the local private sector.

Messrs Hubbard and Duggan have in mind a blueprint for change. Appropriately enough for a field where everything seems to have been tried at least once before, they turn to history. They point out that the Marshall Plan, used to fund post-war reconstruction in Europe, operated in part by providing resources that were lent to local businesses. These companies then repaid their governments in local currency, which could be used to fund infrastructure, for instance. The authors’ solution, therefore, is a sort of modified new Marshall Plan for poor countries, with aid going directly to developing-country businesses; poor countries would compete by carrying out microeconomic reforms that make it easy to start and build companies.

This is all sensible stuff. But as the authors well recognise, the political economy of a well-entrenched aid business will not welcome the sort of shake-up they have in mind. Nor is it obvious that what worked in post-war Europe, where the institutions that underpin a successful market economy were in place and human capital was not lacking, will work in Africa. The book’s account of how countries made seemingly counterproductive policy choices is simplistic at best. It is true that many poor countries embraced state planning after they became independent. But to claim that they did this partly because economists preferred focusing on what makes economies grow rather than paying attention to whether economic activity should be organised through markets or by the state is misleading.

Still, the book articulates a constructive set of ideas about how to reform foreign aid. It should interest those who are convinced by the conclusions of the critics of aid, but remain disappointed by the poverty of their prescriptions.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 19:54 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
En dit is natuurlijk ook een belachelijke argumentatie:
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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 19:59 schreef Reya het volgende:

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Het zou verontrustender zijn als kredieten al binnen achttien maanden tot een forse consumptiestijging zouden leiden: dat zou betekenen dat kredieten ofwel direct voor consumptie worden gebruikt, waar kredieten niet voor bedoeld zijn, of dat eventuele winsten niet worden gebruikt voor sparen dan wel investeren, maar voor consumptie, waardoor bedrijfjes bij de minste of geringste tegenslag meteen weer op de fles gaan.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:05 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Leuke ruis die je rond strooit maar dat de investeerder tevreden is en zijn geld terug krijgt kan never nooit niet een goede indicator zijn van armoedebestrijding.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:12 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Niet mee eens. Het heeft alleen succes als de kredietnemer meer profijt maakt, door zijn eigen handelen, dan de kredietverlener. Maar dat is mijn punt niet. Mijn punt is dat het weer typisch The Economist is om naar de westerse bovenliggende partij te kijken en te constateren dat als die tevreden is dat dan de armoede ook wel zal af nemen.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:12 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Niet helemaal mee eens. Het heeft alleen succes als de kredietnemer meer profijt maakt, door zijn eigen handelen, dan de kredietverlener, die uiteraard ook profijt mag en moet hebben. Maar dat is mijn punt niet. Mijn punt is dat het weer typisch The Economist is om naar de westerse bovenliggende partij te kijken en te constateren dat als die tevreden is dat dan de armoede ook wel zal af nemen.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:22 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Hoeft niet. Mensen worden geregeld in de fuik gelokt en soms zijn er niet veel alternatieven voorhanden. India is bijvoorbeeld een land wat door de wereldbank wordt gebruikt om elders in de wereld armoede te kunnen bestrijden.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:24 schreef Reya het volgende:

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Nou, vertel eens op welke manier dat gebeurt.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:28 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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De IRBD genereert het geld wat door de IDA wordt gebruikt. In principe een gezonde situatie maar de IRBD richt zich op andere landen dan de IDA, daarbij hoort ook dat de IRBD zich op andere typen personen en bedrijven richt dan de IDA.
Het is slechts een voorbeeld dat in het geval van India de alternatieven van de o zo verguisde traditionele wegen, waaronder natuurlijk de WB, niet voorhanden zijn.

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Microkrediet is soms niet meer dan een rebranding van loan sharks. Het type wat je dus ook in de VS en UK hebt en absoluut niet werkt. Orgineel was het natuurlijk gericht op ontwikkelingslanden maar tegenwoordig heten de praktijken in de achterbuurten van de VS ook al microfinanciering, tsja.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 20:19 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Ik heb er niks over gezegd dus hoef ik ook niet te reageren.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 22:09 schreef Zith het volgende:
Kiva is geen uitzondering want over het geheel is er niets fouts aan microkrediet, ik kijk dan ook erg uit naar de uitzendingen van het radio programma waar ze wel eens met emperische data mogen komen.