Het microkrediet maakt de arme mensen nog veel armer.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 18:04 schreef verzer het volgende:
En stichtingen zoals Kiva dan? Waarbij je renteloos uitleent...

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 18:13 schreef JohnDope het volgende:
Doe dan gewoon geen microcrediet. Want zonder microcrediet gaan die mensen een stuk minder snel naar de verdommenis.

@ Crazy Harry: tot op heden deed de linksekerk alsof het "microcrediet" een geschenk uit de hemel was en er niks humaner bestond dan het microcrediet. En dat is op zijn zachtst gezegd orwelliaans te noemen.

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Het feit dat mensen bewust geld lenen om te investeren en dit terugbetalen laat al zien dat ze ervan profiteren. Waarom zouden ze anders lenen.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 18:37 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 18:36 schreef Crazy Harry het volgende:

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Zonder microkrediet kunnen die mensen toch helemaal geen krediet krijgen? Dan kunnen ze dus zeker geen ontwikkeling doormaken. Dan kan je beter zeggen dat er ook traditionele ontwikkelingshulp (voedselhulp) geleverd moet worden (onder voorwaarde dat deze de plaatselijke ondernemingen niet verstoord) zodat men de lening niet op hoeft te eten en daadwerkelijk als investering kan gebruiken.

Iets geweldig vinden is in jouw ogen dus al orwelliaans?
Volgens mij is er nooit geprobeerd is om zelfs maar valse informatie breed te verspreiden onder de bevolking dus ik snap niet dat jij van orwelliaans kan spreken. Je zorgt er op die manier voor dat dat begrip een heftige inflatie ondergaat.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 18:38 schreef Zith het volgende:

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Nou?

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 17:50 schreef JohnDope het volgende:

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Dit is ook weer typische westerse blanke arrogantie als je een rente van 30 a 40% goed keurt
En dan ook nog geloven dat je de mensheid ook echt helpt.
Orwelliaanser kan bijna niet.

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Op woensdag 6 januari 2010 19:00 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Maar het helpt dus niet, net zoals het in de Uk en VS niet helpt.

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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.