IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sol/wpaper/07-014.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Microfinance: are its promises ethically justified?

Author

Listed:
  • Annabel Vanroose

Abstract

Microfinance is increasingly seen as a major development tool. Its promise to help the poor by providing financial services is seen as the major reason for its support. Nevertheless, its effectiveness on actual poverty reduction is not yet clear and therefore it generates some unresolved ethical questions. These become even more prominent in the process of commercialization. The impact on poverty is usually measured in financial terms. In this paper, poverty is defined in a broader sense to include deficiency in financial as well as human and social capital. The article shows that, in this broad sense, microfinance may have negative as well as positive effects on poverty.

Suggested Citation

  • Annabel Vanroose, 2007. "Microfinance: are its promises ethically justified?," Working Papers CEB 07-014.RS, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    • Handle: RePEc:sol:wpaper:07-014
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/14667/1/rou-0242.pdf
    File Function: rou-0242
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ahmad Nawaz & Sana Iqbal & Sadaf Ehsan, 2018. "Does Social Performance Drive Corporate Governance Mechanism In Case of Asian MFIs? An Issue of Endogeneity," Global Business Review, International Management Institute, vol. 19(4), pages 988-1012, August.
    2. Uddin, Md Hamid & Akter, Shabiha & Mollah, Sabur & Al Mahi, Masnun, 2022. "Differences in bank and microfinance business models: An analysis of the loan monitoring systems and funding sources," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    3. Nawaz, Ahmad & Iqbal, Sana, 2015. "Does Social Performance Drives Corporate Governance Mechanism in MFIs? An Issue of Endogeneity," MPRA Paper 65312, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ethics; microfinance; commercialization; poverty.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:sol:wpaper:07-014. 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: Benoit Pauwels (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebulbe.html .

    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.