In order to help get some kind of bearing on the impact of microfinance, we present here a short literature review on how microfinance affects the lives of the poor. The selected papers are organized into three categories: the broader context, the impact of microcredit, and the impact of microsavings (surprisingly, there seems to have been more work done on savings than credit).

The broader context

Effects of Financial Access on Savings by Low-Income People
Fernando Aportelo, Bank of Mexico
December 1999

This paper assesses the impact of increasing financial access on low-income people savings. Effects on households’ saving rates and on different informal savings instruments are considered. The paper uses an exogenous expansion of a Mexican savings institute, targeted to low-income people, as a natural experiment and the 1992 and 1994 National Surveys of Income and Expenditures. Results show that the expansion increased the average saving rate of affected households by more than 3 to almost 5 percentage points. The effect was even higher for the poorest households in the sample: their saving rate increased by more than 7 percentage points in some cases. Furthermore, the expansion, in general, had no effect on high income households. In the case of informal savings instruments, evidence of crowding out of these instruments caused by the expansion is limited. Results do not rule out the possibility that a considerable fraction of the increase in households’ savings could have come from new savings.

Do Rural Banks Matter? Evidence From The Indian Social Banking Experiment
Robin Burguess & Rohini Pande; LSE, Yale University
August 2003

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirial evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian Central Bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a branch in a location with one or more bank branches only if it opens four in locations with no bank branches. We show that between 1977 and 1990 this rule caused banks to open relatively more rural branches in Indian states with lower initial financial development. The reverse is true outside this period. We exploit this fact to identify the impact of opening a rural bank on poverty and output. Our estimates suggest that the Indian rural branch expansion program significantly lowered rural poverty, and increased non-agricultural output.

The Economic Lives of the Poor
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo; Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT
October 2006

This paper uses survey data from 13 countries to document the economic lives of the poor (those living on less than $2 dollar per day per capita at purchasing power parity ) or the extremely poor (those living on less than $1 dollar per day). We describe their patterns of consumption and income generation as well as their access to markets and publicly provided infrastructure. The paper concludes with a discussion of some apparent anomalous choices.

The Impact of Microcredit

Expanding Microenterprise Credit Access: Using Randomized Supply Decisions to Estimate the Impacts in Manila
Dean Karlan, Jonathan Zinman;
Yale University, Darthmouth College, IPA, Financial Access Initiative, MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab
July 2009

Microcredit seeks to promote business growth and improve well-being by expanding access to credit. We use a field experiment and follow-up survey to measure impacts of a credit expansion for microentrepreneurs in Manila. The effects are diffuse, heterogeneous, and surprising. Although there is some evidence that profits increase, the  mechanism seems to be that businesses shrink by shedding unproductive workers. Overall, borrowing households substitute away from labor (in both family and outside businesses), and into education. We also find substitution away from formal insurance, along with increases in access to informal risksharing mechanisms. Our treatment effects are stronger for groups that are not typically targeted by microlenders: male and higher-income entrepreneurs. In all, our results suggest that microcredit works broadly through risk management and investment at the household level, rather than directly through the targeted businesses.

The miracle of microfinance? Evidence from a randomized evaluation
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, Cynthia Kinnan; MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Indian Centre for Micro Finance, Spandana
October 2009
Hyderabad, India

The researchers from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT and the Indian Centre for Micro Finance worked with Spandana to randomize the roll-out of its microcredit operations in Hyderabad, India’s fifth-largest city. Spandana chose 104 areas of the city to expand into eventually, rejecting some districts as having too many construction workers, who come and go and might take Spandana’s money with them. In 2006–-07 Spandana started lending in a randomly chosen 52 of the 104. Researchers followed up by surveying more than 6,000 households between August 2007 and April 2008, restricting their visits to families that seemed more likely to borrow: ones that had lived in the area at least three years and had at least one working-age woman. The surveyors made sure not to visit an area until Spandana had been there at least a year. They surveyed in “treatment” areas (ones where Spandana worked) and control ones (where it did not yet).

The impact of microsavings

The Impacts of Savings
Dean Karlan
Financial Access Initiative
January 2008

A summary of literature on the impact of microinsurance up to January 2008.

Female Empowerment: Impact of a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines
Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, Wesley Yin; HBS and Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Yale, University of Chicago
March 2008

Female “empowerment” has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a randomized controlled trial, we examine whether access to and marketing of an individually-held commitment savings product leads to an increase in female decision-making power within the household. We find positive impacts, particularly for women who have below median decision-making power in the baseline, and we find this leads to a shift towards female-oriented durables goods purchased in the household.

Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya
Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson; UCLA, UCSC, NBER
March 2009

We conducted a field experiment to test whether savings constraints prevent the self-employed from increasing the size of their businesses. We opened interest-free savings accounts in a village bank in rural Kenya for a randomly selected sample of poor daily income earners. Despite the fact that the bank charged substantial withdrawal fees, take-up and usage was high among women and the savings accounts had substantial, positive impacts on their productive investment levels and expenditures. These results imply that a substantial fraction of daily income earners face important savings constraints and have a demand for formal saving devices (even for those that offer negative de facto interest rates).

Tying Odysseus to the Mast: Evidence from a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines
Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, Wesley Yin
July 2005

We designed a commitment savings product for a Philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology. The savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings, and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism. We conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank. One month later, we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients; 202 (28.4 percent) accepted the offer and opened the account. In the baseline survey, we asked hypothetical time discounting questions. Women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current tradeoffs, and hence potentially have a preference for commitment, were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account. After twelve months, average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group. We conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings, and not merely a short-term response to a new product.

On the other hand, NYTimes microfinance evangelist Nicholas Kristof recently called for a “savings revolution”. To back up that call to arms, Rodman points to a great study on the impact of microsavings. That study, by Dupas and Robinson from rural Kenya, is an exciting read for it shows that despite negative rates of return on savings accounts, rural women both love savings accounts and seem to benefit from them:

We find that, about 6 months after having gained access to the account, the daily private expenditures of women sampled for the account were, on average, 37 to 44% higher than those of women in the comparison group. Their average daily food expenditures were 14-29% higher.

Why do savings accounts work so well? The study points out this may be because women without accounts “may be tempted to spend any cash that they hold” and because “it may be difficult to refuse requests for money.” In other words, savings accounts bring discipline to consumption patterns.

There is an interesting parallel with microcredit here. Recent studies of microfinance show that microcredit tends to smooth out consumption – allowing people to purchase consumer goods (TVs, refrigerators) that they would not be able to pay for up front. No doubt, microsavings can help individuals do the same – consumer more. However, there is a huge difference in the dynamics of how that consumption happens. In the case of microsavings, individuals are spending past income. In the case of microcredit, individuals are spending future income – money they neither have nor can risk loosing.

This also leads us to another benefit of microsavings – it acts as insurance in times of illnes. This is another “suggestive finding” of the Dupas and Robinson study:

We find that individuals are not fully protected from income risk. In particular, our logbooks show that, over the period of study, women in the control group were forced to draw down their working capital in response to health shocks. Women sampled for the savings account, however, were less likely to reduce their business investment levels when dealing with a health shock and were better able to smooth their labor supply over illness. In particular, women in the treatment group were more likely to be able to afford medical expenses for more serious illness episodes.

Finally, there is reason to believe that microsavings might be better business as well. For one, it requires no startup capital – which is provided by the clients themselves. Second, the cost of providing credit should actually be higher that for provision of savings – because accepting savings does not require doing a credit check. And finally, operational costs should also be similar or lower.

That logic brings us full circle. Microsavings do much the same for the poor as microcredit (i.e. smooth consumption and investment). And they do so at a lower cost. So why not replace microcredit with microsavings – which seems to be microcredit at a lower cost and with insurance built in.

For more, read Financial Inclusion in India and Do Rural Banks Matter.

The studies are not new but their coverage on the NYT is certainly refreshing. And looking at them together reveals a few interesting points.

First, it is clear that the accepted usage of the term “microfinance” has expanded substantially. First Macro Bank should not even be compared to Spandana for its target clientele is extremely different – existing entrepreneurs with above average national income. That FMB qualifies as a “microlender” seems to suggest merely that microfinance is now behaving as any business – going after the most profitable clients.

Second, it is clear that the impact of microfinance is a lot more fuzzy than development enthusiasts had us believe:

The effect on businesses is not dramatic but some clearly benefit. In the Philippines, male-owned businesses increase profits, although female-owned businesses do not. In India, borrowers who already own a business buy assets for their business. One borrower out of eight starts a business they would not have started otherwise. Others buy durables for their homes

However, there is no evidence that microcredit has any effect on health, education, or women’s empowerment, at least right now, eighteen months after they got the loans. On the other hand, there is also no evidence that people are behaving irresponsibly. Indeed in India we have evidence of people giving up some of the little daily pleasures of life (like tea, snacks, betel leaves and tobacco), to pay for bigger things that they could not previously afford (carts for their business, televisions for their homes).

So, microfinance has no clear impact on socio-economic indicators. And that is ok according to the authors.

Many seem to think that this is not enough. However, as we see it, microcredit seems to have delivered exactly what a successful new financial product is supposed deliver—allowing people to make large purchases that they would not have been able to otherwise. The fact that some people expected much more from it (and perhaps they are right, may be it will just take longer), is perhaps inevitable given how eager the world is to find that one magic bullet that would finally “solve” poverty. But to actually blame microcredit for not promoting the immunization of children is no different from blaming immunization campaigns for not generating new businesses.

In other words, the failure of microfinance to deliver a miraculous cure for poverty is a failure of its early proponents, not of the method itself. As a report pointed out in 2006, microfinance should be viewed as just another business. That perspective is very necessary if we are to get some realism into the debate on what works in microfinance and what does not.

Microfinance has succeeded in developing a relatively low-cost delivery model that can reach millions of underserved clients. That is its success. Its failure is that it has for too long believed in its own rhetoric of poverty alleviation. Now that we know that is not true, it is time to move beyond an obsession with providing credit, to other financial products such as savings and insurance that are likely to be much more effective at insulating the poor from life’s volatility.

The result: Today in India, some poor neighborhoods are being “carpet-bombed” with loans, says Rajalaxmi Kamath, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore who studies the issue. In India, microloans outstanding grew 72% in the year ended March 31, 2008, totaling $1.24 billion, according to Sa-Dhan, an industry association in New Delhi.

This development should hardly be surprising as commentators have long warned of the perils of too much credit chasing too few good candidates. That, and poor governance, were identified last by the MF Banana Skins 2008 report as key challenges for the future of the industry.

There is a parallel here with the sub-prime crises which had its origins in these same twin problems – too much credit and moral hazard on the part of those doing the lending (see this post for more). Yet, despite these problems, microfinance continues to grow.

According to the Monitor Institute microloan volume grew from USD 4 billion in 2001 to USD 25 billion in 2006. And new microfinance investment vehicles (MIVs) are going beyond debt financing to take equity stakes as well (e.g. the DWM Microfinance Equity Fund I closed this summer with USD 82 million from four institutional investors), illustrating a growing confidence in this sector.

An interesting observation is that loan volume growth seems to be outpacing actual investment growth by a large margin. While loan volumes were USD 25 billion in 2006, a CGAP brief estimates assets in MIVs in Europe and the US at only USD 6.5 billion. The remaining money must be coming from savings, public equity (e.g. Compartamos), philanthropic grants, IOs, and other public institutions. Nevertheless, MFIs must still be heavily leveraged to have such large loan books.

A second observation is that while private MIVs have the most incentive to ensure quality of microloans they also have the most incentive to charge higher interest rates. This is particularly so now that microfinance advocates have advertised themselves as a new and uncorrelated asset class resilient to the economic recession.

This makes microfinance doubly vulnerable compared to housing finance before the sub-prime crises. While the latter was only vulnerable to defaults from below, microfinance is also vulnerable to ethical pressures. Having sold itself as a “social investment,” microfinance cannot be seen to create indebtedness. Should that happen the flood of money in this sector will likely dry up quickly, putting pressure on the MFIs and in turn on the borrowers.

It is time that social investors and microfinance proponents scaled back their optimism – both on the impact of microfinance and on its investment potential. Microfinance cannot be immune to the basic rule of finance that risk and return are correlated. Moreover, such high expectations provide incentives to actually undermine both the social impact and potential returns of microfinance. An expectation of growth incentivizes providing loans even to those that cannot use them for anything other than consumption. And an expectation of higher or more consistent returns provides incentives for higher rates, which in turn can lead to indebtedness.

Microfinance investors may be doing damage to their own investments in this manner, by compromising the sustainability of the model. It is time for some realism, because regardless of whether microfinance is good or not endless growth cannot be without consequences – as the subprime crises showed.

The authors conclude in their randomized trial of 52 (of 104) slums in India:

We show that the intervention increased total MFI borrowing, and study the e¤ects on new business starts, investment, and consumption. Households with an existing business at the time of the program invest in durable goods, and their profits increase. Households with high propensity to become business owners see a decrease in nondurable consumption, consistent with the need to pay a fixed cost to enter entrepreneurship. Households with low propensity to become business owners see nondurable spending increase. We find no impact on measures of health, education, or women’s decision-making.

There are several interesting results to be gleaned for this summary, but just as many questions.

Testing the Enterprise Hypothesis

The first interesting result is that microfinance seems to encourage, or at least enable, commercial enterprise. According to the survey the presence of microfinance helps to “create and expand businesses” amongst a subset of current or “likely” entrepreneurs. However, amongst the rest of the population, it tends to increase non-durable consumption.

The last part of this result is not surprising as anecdotal evidence has long suggested that microfinance works also to smooth consumption. What is surprising, however, is the high density of entrepreneurs in the target communities. A full 31% of households run a very small business – compared to the OECD average of 12%. This may seem counter-intuitive. Then again, the opportunity cost of poor households becoming entrepreneurs is extremely low, which may explain this result.

Testing the Development Impact

The survey also tests the impact on development indicators and finds no impact whatsover on health or education. While the MF as a tool for development argument has long ago been dropped by most serious MF proponents, this undermines it further. That said, as the authors note, it may be too early to conclude that microfinance does not enhance social outcomes. Rather, “after a longer time, when the investment impacts have translated into higher total expenditure for more households, it is possible that impacts on education, health, or womens’ empowerment would emerge.”

Open Questions

Unfortunately, the study seems to leave open several questions – and the report is missing several critical pieces of information.

First, it seems 69% of households in the baseline have outstanding loans at an average rate of 3.85% per month. What is the average loan amount and rate charged after the Spandana intervention and do loan rates come down? A key criticism of MFIs has been that loan rates seem to remain stubbornly high – is that true?

Second, what is the percentage of population that are likely entrepreneurs. In other words does microfinance, on balance, lead to greater enterprise or greater non-durable consumption?

Finally, and most important, the study says nothing about the failure rate of businesses. In the baseline, 30% of households have a business. Just how many of these still exist at a later point in time? Similarly, how many of the entrepreneurs that borrow, succeed?

This point is particularly relevant if you consider that existing businesses seem to register an increase in business profits of up to INR 5,000 – a 600% maximum rate of return in some cases. Such returns cannot be had without substantial risk, a monopoly, or some other market imperfection. So, where is the catch?

Conclusion

This survey is worth reading simply because it is the first real study on the impact of microfinance. It is interesting in that the results are intuitive – credit in the BoP world seems to work similar to how it works in the developed world. Responsible and entrepeneurial individuals use it to start businesses or save for the future. But many others use it to live beyond their means and may end up in a debt trap.

That said, the survey is also interesting in what it does not reveal about microfinance. While the inconclusive evidence on human development indicators can simply be a matter of time, it is a tangential issue. At the core of microfinance today, is its value proposition as a business incubator. There are as many questions on microfinance as a business itself that must be answered.

MI would have us believe that the problem with securitization was only its implementation, and therefore, can be fixed. But there is a more fundamental problem with securitization – as applied to subprime or microfinance loans – that is not one merely of implementation, and thus cannot be fixed by regulation and transparency.

As pointed out by this World Bank paper, securitization creates a moral hazard that “adversely affects the screening incentives of lenders.” In the MFI world this means that if MFIs do not own the risk of a loan, they are less likely to screen potential creditors properly. The result is likely to be an increase in default rates.

This is not all, though. If the subprime crises was caused partly by moral hazard, the impact of that hazard was magnified by the availability of cheap and plentiful credit. Banks vastly increased credit availability to subprime creditors simply because money was cheap and easy to be had. This reduced any remaining incentive on the part of lenders to conduct proper due diligence.

Microfinance was, till recently, in a similar situation – overfunded but with few good organizations to lend through (see the 2008 MF Banana Skins report). Given the availability of cash, it is unclear why securitization – as a means of increasing capital for MFIs – is even necessary. Any good MFI should have no trouble raising cash. And any bad MFI should not get cash – even through securitization.

Finally, the idea of securitization for MFIs also ignores another article in MI that talks of the Dangers of Leverage. The author argues that many MFIs are blind to the risk of credit default.

Further analysis from the Risk Roundtable in Mumbai supplies an eerie parallel to the early stages of the downfall of banks and investment banks. The risk survey leading up to the Roundtable found that most respondents, including MFIs, investors and lenders, felt that liquidity risk is the major risk, not risk of credit losses.

Microfinance, as a sector, has done well – continuing to provide moderately positive returns even in the current environment (see graph). This has led its proponents to claim that microfinance is a separate asset class uncorrelated to bonds, equities, and even alternative assets such as real estate, commodities, and hedge funds.

Symbiotics Microfinance Index (USD)

Yet, the dynamics of risk and return can not be any different in microfinance. Given that MFIs do not consider credit risk extremely high and have amply money for lending, their incentives for proper screening are already low. Securitization would take away any remaining incentives, and seems to be a solution looking for a problem, rather than the other way around, that could prove dangerous for this still unproven sector.

Update: After some research, I’ve realized that securitization of microfinance is not so new after all. The MIT Journal Innovations discussed it in 2007 (Is Securitization Right for Microfinance). Go back even further, and BusinessWeek had a feature on it in September 2004 (Tiny Loans, High Finance). And according to this discussion at Chicago’s GSB, the idea has been around “since the mid-1990s.”

The problems Karnani cites are well known, and were pointed out years ago by Thomas Dichter, among others. People take microfinance’s poverty alleviating characteristics as fact – so much so that nobody has really studied the phenomenon. Those that have, says Karnani, find the impact on poverty is not as unambiguous – and he quotes several studies:

One of the most comprehensive studies reaches a surprising conclusion: Microloans are more beneficial to borrowers living above the poverty line than to borrowers living below the poverty line. This is because clients with more income are willing to take the risks, such as investing in new technologies, that will most likely increase income flows. Poor borrowers, on the other hand, tend to take out conservative loans that protect their subsistence, and rarely invest in new technology, fixed capital, or the hiring of labor.

Microloans sometimes even reduce cash flow to the poorest of the poor, observes Vijay Mahajan, the chief executive of Basix, an Indian rural finance institution. He concludes that microcredit “seems to do more harm than good to the poorest.”

The failure of microfinance to bring people out of poverty should not be surprising, except to those deafened by its hoopla. People below the poverty line simply “do not have the skills, vision, creativity, and persistence to be entrepreneurial. Even in developed countries with high levels of education and access to financial services, about 90 percent of the labor force is employees, not entrepreneurs.” Indeed, Thomas Dichter made a similar point, pointing out:

The microcredit paradox is that the poorest people can do little productive with the credit, and the ones who can do the most with it are those who don’t really need microcredit, but larger amounts with different (often longer) credit terms.

Karnani’s Solution: Jobs, not Microcredit

Karnani – as you may remember – previously challenged C.K.Prahalad and his “Bottom of the Pyramid” theory (see also NextBillion). He, of couse, has his own solution – creating jobs through encouraging labor intensive industrial production. The PDF of his article is worth reading, for it shows how poverty declined rapidly in China, but not India and Africa – largely due to such growth.

Yet my analysis of the macroeconomic data suggests that although microcredit yields some noneconomic benefits, it does not significantly alleviate poverty. Indeed, in some instances microcredit makes life at the bottom of the pyramid worse. Contrary to the hype about microcredit, the best way to eradicate poverty is to create jobs and to increase worker productivity.

To understand why creating jobs, not offering microcredit, is the better solution to alleviating poverty, consider these two alternative scenarios: (1) A microfinancier lends $200 to each of 500 women so that each can buy a sewing machine and set up her own sewing microenterprise, or (2) a traditional financier lends $100,000 to one savvy entrepreneur and helps her set up a garment manufacturing business that employs 500 people. In the first case, the women must make enough money to pay off their usually high-interest loans while competing with each other in exactly the same market niche. Meanwhile the garment manufacturing business can exploit economies of scale and use modern manufacturing processes and organizational techniques to enrich not only its owners, but also its workers.

A Good Idea Gone Worse: Markets Trump the State

Karnani makes a lot of sense. Microfinance may have some non-economic benefits but it has been hijacked by “development experts” and “grassroots NGOs” to expand their legitimacy, and become something it never was intended to be. He is equally critical of Prahalad, who in his opinion “glosses over the real issue” – the failure of government and public service - by urging companies to provide consumer goods when what they need are the fundamentals:

Why do poor people accept that they cannot expect running water? Even if they do accept this bleak view, why should we? Instead, we should emphasize the failure of government and attempt to correct it. Giving a voice to the poor is a central aspect of the development process.

That is the key here – the development process. In that sense, the hoopla around microfinance and markets is doubly egregious – for it encourages a blind belief that markets will solve the world’s poverty issues by themselves. They will not. Indeed, by promoting microfinance, and micro entrepreneurs, the hoopla might make things worse, by encouraging economic activity well below economies of scale.

For too long, the world has naively believed that microfinance alleviates poverty. A nobel peace prize and several hundres of millions in private capital have been dedicated to the cause. Yet, the cause is ephemereal. The reality of microcredit is less attractive than the promise, and “even The Economist is beginning to realize it”. Time the well informed development expert, philanthropist, and policy maker focused on something real.

There are two similarities between the poor in the US and the poor in the rest of the world. First, they don’t make much money. Second, everyone wants to lend to them. This article gives plenty of food for thought, for why that may not be such a good thing – not as a business, but as a way out of poverty.

A Question of Choice

Some support credit based on the faith that the market knows best. Credit – even expensive credit – allows the market to function, and is better than no credit at all simply because it increases choice. Much the same argument is made by C.K.Prahalad, in support of the Base of the Pyramid theory – which extols corporations to see the billions of poor as consumers:

Nobody, poor or rich, is compelled to pay a high price for a used car, a credit card, or anything else…”The only feasible way to run a capitalist society is to allow companies to maximize their profits,” says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “That will sometimes include allowing them to sell things to people that will sometimes make them worse off.”

Even if one were to accept the superiority of free-markets (not a given), this argument has a flaw. The theory fails because low-income consumers – and the poor in developing countries – do not live in perfect markets. Rather, they live in markets that are imperfect and subject to asymmetric information. The result is exploitation, and a choice that can be often illusory, and sometimes dangerous:

A public housing administrator who reviews tenants’ tax returns pointed out to Thomas that Jackson Hewitt had pared $453, or 10.4%, in tax-prep fees and interest from Thomas’ anticipated refund. Only then did she discover that various services for low-income consumers prepare taxes for free and promise returns in as little as a week. “Why should I pay somebody else, some big company, when I could go to the free service?” she asks. The lack of sophistication of borrowers like Thomas helps ensure that the Money Now loan and similar offerings remain big sellers.

Cheap Credit
Another argument for microcredit is that it is cheaper than the alternative – a moneylender. In America, there is no equivalent, so low-income credit is indeed the only alternative. But is it really cheap?

Not quite. If anything, credit has become more expensive:

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. “It’s not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more,” says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp

The microcredit market is still new, but one sees a similar trend there. As access to credit has expanded, institutions have grown and tapped commercial capital. That capital seeks market and risk-adjusted returns. Those returns can only come at the cost of more expensive credit – and poorly informed consumers.

The Myth of Enterprise & the End of Poverty

Finally, the diehard also believe that microcredit helps start new sustainable businesses. By some miracle, the developing world’s poor are an army of entrepreneurs, seeking capital to start sustainable and profitable businesses, that will pull millions of microcredit customers out of poverty. Yet, evidence suggests microcredit does not go to start enteprises, but to smooth consumption. And that is a road that is just as likely to lead to indebtedness, as to riches:

She graduated in 1992, owing $45,000 on student loans. That debt became her main financial burden, she says. The 9.5% interest rate isn’t particularly steep, but she tended to view the payments as less pressing than putting food on the table or paying rent. Late fees piled up. Today she owes $159,991, up from $117,000 only 18 months ago. When dunning notices arrive, she tosses them in the stove.

There is no reason to believe that the poor in America are any less entrepreneurial than their developing world bretheren. So if credit – cheap or not – has not saved the former from poverty, is there reason to believe it will save the latter, who have substantially fewer skills and opportunities?

Calling a Spade a Spade: A Good Business

Low-income consumers in the U.S. are an interesting case study for microfinance proponents worldwide. Because credit by itself doesn’t seem to be helping them. “Instead of becoming an opportunity for upward social and economic mobility, it becomes a debt trap for many trying to move up,” according to Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

There is a lot of money involved here. According to Stephens Inc, such “alternative financial services” totals more than $250 billion a year. Still, let stop pretending that credit will save the world and its poor. It hasn’t yet in a country where it has been plentiful for a long time. This is a business, and microcredit an industry. Like all businesses, it will help some and make others worse off. Let us figure out what to do with the latter.

Understanding how microfinance affects clients is not straightforward because there are several possible explanations for why, say, a borrower is doing well compared to her non-borrowing peers. The credit might be helping–or perhaps the borrower was already comparatively prosperous and would have fared as well even without the loan. These new papers elucidate cause and effect by performing controlled experiments, in which a few parameters are randomly varied and the effects measured.

Controlled Experiments?

The idea of ‘experiments’ sounds good. It gives scientific legitimacy to what are essentially social phenomena marked by multiple variables, complex correlations, and extraneous – often invisible – factors. I need to look at these reports to see just how ‘controlled’ they are.

Another organization that has been taking a similar approach to impact assessment is Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Genevieve has joined IPA and will lead a couple of evaluations in the Philippines, including one on group vs. individual lending that sounds awfully close to what the CGD has published.

I have two propositions for Genevieve that could lead to some interesting evaluation projects.

Experiment One: Social Impact – Profit vs. Development Benefits

First, there is an inherent tradeoff between microfinance as a business and as a development tool. Microfinance will largely benefit one of two stakeholders – commercial enterprises and their shareholders, or poor borrowers. As Muhammad Yunus recently made me realize the two are mutually exclusive.

So, how may one test this assertion? Evaluating the interest rates offered by MFI’s and asking the following questions may offer a few clues:

• How do MFI rates compare with what a money lender was offering?
• How do they compare to those of Grameen Bank – which says it can offer lower interest rates by being ‘non-loss, non-dividend’.
• Is there a trend towards higher interest rates, the higher the commercial pressure on an organization? Do banks offer higher rates than independent MFIs, than grassroots NGOs?
• Did an MFI’s interest rates go up after it partnered with a bank?
• Have aggregate interest rates gone up over time, as the need to prove development benefits has gone down?

This is an important test, because if true it allows us to categorize MFIs into two groups and then test for development impact across them. It may also show that most MFIs today embrace the rhetoric of a ‘market based development solution’, ignoring the fact that development benefits accrue only when the solution is priced somewhat below the market rate (set by the money lender). In other words, the major benefit of these providers is to expand the market by bringing in external funds, not any development impact, per se.

Experiment Two: Generating Enterprise – Equity vs. Debt

My second assertion is that microfinance is inherently flawed as a tool to create ’sustainable enterprise’. Studies show that microfinance ends up funding consumption of individuals. This may well be commendable in itself. However, if our goal is to create enterprise for long-term economic growth how can microfinance be more effective?

The problem is that the incentives of MFIs are not oriented towards generating sustainable enterprise. They are oriented simply towards repayment of loans. The latter is not an indication of success of the former. One way to generate private enterprise through ‘the market’ may then be to use equity, not debt, to fund micro and small entrepreneurs.

So, here’s another test. Do organizations which take equity stakes in micro and small enterprises (MSE) have a better incubation success rate than microfinance providers?

I am compelled to write this (long) post, because I must recommend to everyone that ever has a chance, to listen to him. Listen to him not because his work is en vogue, nor because of his Nobel Prize, nor because he is an excellent speaker mixing humor with the dirty reality of his work. Listen to him simply because he is a man whose idea – microfinance – has been completely misunderstood.

A Brief History of Microfinance

In telling the story of Grameen Bank, they say the first loan every given was $27. What they do not say is that that loan was given to a collective of 42 people. The tiny scale of that amount, and how its usefulness contradicts everything we believe to hold true, sets the stage for Yunus’s life. To hear the story from a man who cannot hide the excitement in the excitement of his clients, is to hear it come alive.

Prof. Yunus started with a simple proposition. In his words, he saw a terrible problem – the grip of moneylenders on a community – to which there was a very easy solution – to lend the money himself. The response he got from the poor – of being almost deified – “hooked him” to what he was doing.

Yet, because he did something nobody else did, or was prepared to do, his work was all about challenging the status quo. Even his insistence on lending to women, was a reaction to banks that did not. Surprisingly women, when initially offered a loan refused saying they did not know what to do with it. Yunus had a simple explanation for that, saying to his colleagues, “it is not her saying no. It is her history saying no.”

Microfinance and Grameen Bank’s Business Model

In 2006 there were about 100 million clients worldwide. Of these, 85% were in Asia with 50 million in India (34mn) and Bangladesh (16mn). 10% of the clients were in Africa with a further 5% in Latin America.

Yet, two thirds of the people in the world do not have access to the financial system, a state of affairs Prof. Yunus believes to be inherently unjust, suggesting that credit should be a human right. In Bangladesh, Grameen Bank (GB) covers 80% of poor households, and soon hopes to reach the rest. But to make financial services a ubiquity requires a policy framework that legalizes microbanking (a process underway in India). GB, I was surprised to learn for instance, has special legal status that allows it to operate as a bank.

There are, however, more fundamental differences between GB and other MFIs. In particular, when GB creates a new branch, its manager is set two targets:

1. That each branch raise its own money. No money is provided to a branch, which implies that branches must raise deposits from the community and use that to disburse loans.
2. That each branch must breakeven within 12 months. At present, GB has achieved that target in 80% of the cases.

The first point is worth repeating because it is very different from what happens in conventional banks. Microfinance today is really microcredit. Banks do not collect deposits from the very poor, and when they do that money is channeled to metropolitan areas. While both strategies may be good for the business they have a negative impact on the community.

The contrast with commercial banks became even more stark when Prof. Yunus was asked what he thought of farmers committing suicide in Vidharbha (a region of India) from chronic indebtedness. That, in his opinion, was a failure of the institution that lent the money – because by making money more important than the client’s life, the institution had failed in its orientation.

Grameen Bank takes a different approach to default. If one person in a group fails to make a payment, the Bank asks other members not to pressure the borrower but to help her repay. For instance, if the default happens because a woman’s husband ran away with money, other group members should bring pressure to bear on the husband, not the woman herself. If everything fails the loan is converted into a very long-term loan. Similarly, bank loans often have insurance built in, so that if a woman is unable to pay or she or her husband dies, the loan can be written off.

The Non-Quantifiable Impact of Microfinance

There were times when I thought Yunus sounded just like any other proponent of microfinance – and I have heard many. When he said, for instance, that he hoped to reach 100% of the people in Bangladesh, I could not help but ask – “then what?”

My problem is that nobody really asks anymore if microfinance actually helps people get out of poverty. It has become an end in itself rather than being a means to an end.

The roots of my skepticism lie in studies that show little income growth among microfinance borrowers. Yet, my insistence on numbers stems from my training in western thinking. To know what percentage of people microfinance helps is necessary, but not sufficient. Because if it helps even one person, that is one more than the alternative. Yunus describes a program that lends to women beggars, encouraging them to become roaming saleswomen. From its 85,000 clients, if even 5,000 were to give up begging that would in Yunus’s opinion be worthwhile (so far 8,000 have done so).

One cannot count the value of social impact simply with those that escape poverty. One must also remember the many who do not but feel otherwise empowered. To dismiss them as irrelevant to the ‘impact’ of microfinance, is to reduce them – and our measure of happiness – to an incomplete number.

And finally, there are knock on effects. Yunus was asked what he thought of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh, which excludes women from the mainstream? In response, he saw microfinance as a tool against that rise. “The more women are empowered, the more fundamentalism is weakened,” he said.

Social Business, Incentives, and Competitive Advantage

Grameen Bank, by putting its clients before profits, is what Yunus calls a “Social Business”. This orientation challenges the very core of economics and what we are taught in business school of the profit-maximization theory. “Yet,” he says, “I find it humiliating that I have to fit into a theory, rather than the other way around.”

In Yunus’ words, classical economics and the theory of profit maximization have done lasting damage by focusing only on one part of human nature. Because while humans are excited by money and the ability to make it, that is not all they are. Doing otherwise, we reduce ourselves to less than what we really are (a point made very forcefully by Amartya Sen in critiquing the dismissal of ethics in economics).

The success of a “social business enterprise” is measured not by profits, but by the number of people served. For instance, a joint venture between GB and Danone that provides fortified milk products to poor children measures its success by the number of children it feeds. Similarly, GB itself can be distinguished from other MFIs that have climbed the bandwagon but offer higher interest rates to maximize profits, rather than cover costs.

The idea is not new. David Green had the same motive in creating Aurolab. But Prof. Yunus is clear that the two motives cannot co-exist in the same business. For if that happens eventually profit-maximization will win over other incentives. There is, as he says “only one bottom line.”

Interestingly, it struck me that among the poor being a social business can also be a competitive advantage. For instance, by being “non-loss, non-dividend”, GB can offer lower interest rates than its competitors. It is an interesting paradox – that by not being profit-maximizing, one has an evolutionary edge over companies that are.

Social Market Exchange

Taking the argument further, if social businesses can exist, they can also benefit from a stock exchange of their own. This would be an exchange on which companies are traded, but each listed company is a social business measured not on its profit but on how many people it helps.

It is an interesting idea. Because people are not only profit-oriented (as demonstrated by philanthropy), each of us exhibits a range of motives for what we do. Our relative share of ‘investment’ in profit-maximizing and social businesses may vary, but there will be many people that will put their money where their belief is.

Parting Impressions: An Ironic Achievement

That really is what Yunus is all about. He is about challenging the mainstream thought process and offering a more complete perspective to what is important, beyond profits.

Yet Yunus’s attempt to prove that social business is viable has been only selectively recognized, and the very businesses he set out to challenge have subsumed his message. Microfinance has gone mainstream, but lost its proposition of being focused on the poor.

It is sobering to ask if social businesses can indeed coexist in society obsessed with western economic theory. Would any social business face the same tradeoff? Would it have to compromise on its values in order to attract global attention?

I retain my criticisms of microfinance as a development tool. In particular the blind belief that it helps alleviate poverty – a belief that prevents objective analysis and the development of alternatives. I share Yunus’s belief that business need not only be profit-maximizing. Yet, the rise of microfinance shows that the gap between how things work today and how we would like to see them work is vast. Microfinance today is not what Yunus set out to do, and he is being applauded for the wrong things. That is the irony of his achievement.