The Credibility of Microcredit: Studies of Impact and Performance

Pullulating from a handful of isolated experiments in the 1970s to a sophisticated network of over 140 million borrowers today, microfinance is a synecdoche for global trends toward market-based solutions to social problems. But in recent years economic crises and political attacks have raised doubts about its efficacy, begetting polemic debates and sometimes baseless assertions from both supporters and detractors of microfinance.
The Credibility of Microcredit offers a more objective assessment of the merits and shortfalls of microfinance around the world by way of interdisciplinary research. It features works from leading researchers in the field of microfinance, as well as new names who complement one another’s work with a variety of methods and theoretical approaches.

Contributors include: Britta Augsburg, Gwendolyn Alexander Tedeschi, Jonathan Bauchet, Cyril Fouillet, Soren Hauge, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Morduch, Michael Pisani, Sujata Shetty, Elisabeth Vik, and David Yoskowitz.

Reprint of some articles published in the journal Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 2010, volume 9, No. 3-4.

Dwight Haase, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toledo, and Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. His works on microfinance have appeared in Contexts and Critical Sociology.