Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the challenges and prospects of global financial integration
- Part I History and context: input, output and the current architecture (whence it came)
- Part II Assessing the current financial architecture (how well does it work?)
- Part III Does the future hold? Reactions to the current regime and prospects for progress (where is it going?)
- 12 Changing transatlantic financial regulatory relations at the turn of the millennium
- 13 Monetary and financial cooperation in Asia: improving legitimacy and effectiveness?
- 14 From microcredit to microfinance to inclusive finance: a response to global financial openness
- 15 Combating pro-cyclicality in the international financial architecture: towards development-friendly financial governance
- 16 Public interest, national diversity and global financial governance
- Conclusion: whither global financial governance after the crisis?
- References
- Index
14 - From microcredit to microfinance to inclusive finance: a response to global financial openness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the challenges and prospects of global financial integration
- Part I History and context: input, output and the current architecture (whence it came)
- Part II Assessing the current financial architecture (how well does it work?)
- Part III Does the future hold? Reactions to the current regime and prospects for progress (where is it going?)
- 12 Changing transatlantic financial regulatory relations at the turn of the millennium
- 13 Monetary and financial cooperation in Asia: improving legitimacy and effectiveness?
- 14 From microcredit to microfinance to inclusive finance: a response to global financial openness
- 15 Combating pro-cyclicality in the international financial architecture: towards development-friendly financial governance
- 16 Public interest, national diversity and global financial governance
- Conclusion: whither global financial governance after the crisis?
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter concerns the place of poor developing countries in the financial architecture and ‘microlending’ as a potential means for alleviating poverty. It critically examines the exponential rise of microfinance institutions (MFIs) and asks why they have become so central within strategies to combat poverty around the globe. Poverty alleviation has so far played a subordinate role in the design and functioning of the global financial system, at least in part because developing countries' concerns have been largely absent from the input side of global financial governance. Microlending is thus first and foremost a response to the exclusion of the poor from global and national financial systems. In important ways, the growth of microfinance is also a reaction to the dilemmas of financial openness and debt traps (Cassimon et al., Chapter 4 in this volume) and the tendency of capital to flow ‘uphill’ from poor to developed economies (Prasad et al. 2006). Thus the crisis-prone process of global financial integration over the last thirty years is arguably the key to understanding this paradigmatic shift in international aid delivery. Global financial crises have increased economic instability for many among the poorest of the poor, who often bear the brunt in developing (and increasingly also developed) countries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Global Financial Integration Thirty Years OnFrom Reform to Crisis, pp. 256 - 269Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
- 1
- Cited by