IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03770830.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Microfinance illusion, poverty and welfare in Cambodia

Author

Listed:
  • Dina Chhorn

    (GREThA - Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée - UB - Université de Bordeaux - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Recent studies at national level have emphasized the failure of microfinance services as a means for development in Cambodia due to high interest rates, non-productive use of loans, over-indebtedness, often landless customers and intergenerational migration. This paper examines the effect of access to microfinance on household poverty and welfare using cross-sectional data from a 2015 survey of 411 households in 48 districts located in nine of Cambodia's provinces. These households were beneficiaries of the Agriculture Cooperative (AC) community development project supported by World Vision and the Australian Government. Applying the Wald test of exogeneity and Newey's minimum chi-squared estimators with the two-step option, probit models of household poverty status were estimated, as well as tobit models of household welfare level with endogenous treatment effects. The findings suggest that access to microfinance is associated with poverty reduction and increased per capita income of the household, but access to microfinance services has an insignificant impact on household welfare proxied by per capita economic assets and expenditure on child well-being. However, the results must be interpreted with caution due to sample selection effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Dina Chhorn, 2020. "Microfinance illusion, poverty and welfare in Cambodia," Post-Print hal-03770830, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03770830
    DOI: 10.1080/13547860.2020.1826074
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mohamed Abdallah Ali & Mazhar Mughal & Dina Chhorn, 2022. "Microfinance and poverty reduction: Evidence from Djibouti," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(2), pages 1189-1224, May.
    2. Chan Mono Oum & Gazi M. Hassan & Mark J. Holmes, 2022. "Impact of Microcredit on Labour Migration Decisions: Evidence from a Cambodian Household Survey," Working Papers in Economics 22/01, University of Waikato.
    3. Dina Chhorn, 2021. "Financial development, poverty, and human development in the Fintech age: a regional analysis of the Southeast Asian states," Post-Print hal-03572473, HAL.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03770830. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.