Digital Archive....

How do we offer credit to unidentifiable people? Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Carmen Easterwood How do you offer a loan to a farmer that can provide no evidence of his credit history or even of his true identity? Microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries face this question every day, as they work to extend credit to people living in countries without credit bureaus, national identification systems, or sometimes even formal identification documents like birth certificates. Without a unique identification system, MFIs cannot track a client's credit history, either within a single organization or across multiple lenders. When MFIs do not know who has a good credit history, there is no way to give creditworthy clients access to more and bigger loans, and no way to restrict clients with a history of defaulting. In a recent study of farmers in rural Malawi, IPA Researchers Dean Yang, Xavier Gine, and Jessica Goldberg looked at how lo...

A challenge to the international community to do much more on ageing in the development sphere Eldis Ageing Populations With one in nine persons in the world aged 60 years or over, projected to increase to one in five by 2050, population ageing is a phenomenon that can ...

Is it wrong to cut UK aid to India? Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad Today's announcement that the UK is to end financial aid to India by 2015 will re-ignite the debate about aid to middle income developing countries.  It's a difficult one.  Is India rich? No--its GDP/capita is a third of China's and a sixth of Brazil.  India is still a very poor country.  You won't see it so much if you go to Delhi or Mumbai but go one hour out of town and you will be shocked.  Is India using its domestic resources as well as it can for poverty reduction? No, but it is trying to get it right--hence the debate over the massive National Food Security Bill.  Why should a country with a space programme get aid?  As I have said before the space programme is as much about weather and land quality mapping as about anything else.  Is UK aid "peanuts" for India as a Indian Minister said in February?  In absolute terms, yes.  But it...

"The End of Cheap Chinese Labor" Chris Blattman At the beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker was only $1,004 in U.S. dollars …However, wages are now rising in China. In 2010, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker reached $5,487 in U.S. dollars …China's wages also increased faster than productivity since the late 1990s, suggesting that Chinese labor is becoming more expensive in this sense as well. China's labor force may have already reached its peak in 2011; and China's rural-to-urban migration will also slow down because the rural young are highly rural-to-urban migration will also slow down because the rural young are highly mobile; almost all rural youth in the 16–20 age bracket are already working off the farm. …Therefore, future increases in migrant labor must come from those who are older or those who have established families, who will require the prospect of larger wage gains than...