Access to Finance

The present paper examines the determinants of remittance behavior for Vietnam using data from the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey on internal migrants. It considers how, among other things, the vulnerability of a migrant's life at the destination, their link to relatives back home, and the time spent at the destination affect remittances. The paper finds that migrants act as risk-averse economic agents and send remittances back to the household of origin as part of an insurance exercise in the face of economic uncertainty. Remittances are also found to be driven by a migrant's labor market earnings level. The paper highlights the important role of remittances in providing an effective means of risk-coping and mutual support within the family.

This study investigates the performance of the financial system in Burundi in mobilizing and allocating resources. Although the study does not presume that finance is the most binding constraint to growth and socio-economic development in Burundi, it takes the view that unlocking the financing constraint could alleviate other impediments to growth and poverty reduction. We use a blend of methodological

Even though small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent the majority of the Egyptian firms, their value added is relatively low. According to previous research, SMEs face a financing gap that causes undercapitalization and represents an obstacle that hinders SMEs from growth. This paper analyzes the current situation of SMEs in Egypt and addresses the question whether the financing problem still

Abstract: Although Kenya's financial system is by far the largest and most developed in East Africa and its stability has improved significantly over the past years, many challenges remain. This paper assesses the stability, efficiency, and outreach of Kenya's banking system, using aggregate, bank-level, and survey data. Banks' asset quality and liquidity positions have improved, making the system more resistant to shocks, and interest rate spreads have declined, in part due to reduction in the overhead costs of foreign banks. ...

Accessing financial services via mobile phone technology, or mobile money services, is making a significant difference to the lives of subsistence entrepreneurs. There is a need to further understand the nature of subsistence entrepreneurship activities to examine how mobile money services create products and processes that can be adopted by subsistence entrepreneurs. Through interviews and contextualised observational research, and utilising Transactions Cost Economics Theory as the theoretical lens for assessing the impacts of mobile money services on business activities, this research identifies five themes showing different subsistence entrepreneurship transaction exchange dimensions such as (1) Subsistence entrepreneurial working assets, (2) Location proximity, (3) Subsistence entrepreneurial incentives, (4) Business supply management and (5) Entrepreneurial transaction process and duration. The mobile money platform as a business solution maximises the value of subsistence entrepreneurship activities through reduced transaction costs, improved business process activities, higher profit margins and greater market access opportunities.

In a highly competitive global economy, improved access to financing by innovative small and medium-sized enterprises has become essential for enhancing competitiveness and meeting the objectives of the Lisbon Partnership for Growth and Jobs. Although venture ...

The global financial crisis brought public guarantees to the forefront of the policy debate. Based on a review of the theoretical foundations of public guarantees, this paper concludes that the commonly used justifications for public guarantees based solely on agency frictions (such as adverse selection or lack of collateral) and/or un-internalized externalities are flawed. When risk is idiosyncratic, it is highly unlikely that a case for guarantees can be made without risk aversion. When risk aversion is explicitly added to the picture, public guarantees may be justified by the state's natural advantage in dealing with collective action failures (providing public goods). The state can spread risk more finely across space and time because it can coordinate and pool atomistic agents that would otherwise not organize themselves to solve monitoring or commitment problems. Public guarantees may be transitory, until financial systems mature, or permanent, when risk is fat-tailed. In ...

In this paper, we present two stylized models of the financial system. We make the case that in order to realize the potential of a well-functioning complete financial market, financial system designers and financial service providers will need to think about ways to deliver financial propositions that are customized to individual households by responding to their unique circumstances. This will

This paper looks at variation across Russian regions in terms of perceived constraints to doing business using the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey of Russian firms. The analysis identifies a number of region-specific business environment components that businesses perceive as significantly more binding constraints to their operations compared with other regions. For several business environment components, however, including corruption and access to finance, inter-regional differences in their perception as constraints are insignificant. This supports the view that large observed differences in actual financial deepening across Russian regions are primarily demand-driven. Alexander Plekhanov is a Principal Economist and Asel Isakova is an Economic Analyst at the EBRD's Office of the Chief Economist. The authors are grateful to Erik Berglöf, Simon Commander, Helena Schweiger, Natalya Volchkova and Ralph de Haas for valuable comments and suggestions. The wor...

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the ongoing crisis, the policy responses to it, and the post-crisis global economy will impact China's medium-term prospects for growth, poverty reduction, and development. The paper reviews China's pre-crisis growth experience, including its relationship to global economic developments. It discusses the pace, composition, sources, and financing of growth during 1995-2007, and the impact of key external and domestic influences. The paper also analyzes the immediate impact of the global crisis on China's economic performance in 2009 and its likely impact in the short run. It then discusses the government's policy response, with a particular focus on the fiscal and monetary stimulus measures. Finally, the paper explores China's medium-term growth prospects in light of the crisis and the key policies for moving to a robust and sustainable growth path post-crisis.

... Was it due to the incoherence of policy – one of Nolan's main criticisms? ... Some domestic firms (such as Ningbo Bird, Amoi, TCL and Legend) have mastered the technology of large-scale handset production and begun to localize applied software and handset feature designs. ...