Policymakers in Latin America increasingly are turning to policies that have high economic rates of return and a favorable impact on income distribution. By providing financial services to small businesses and poor households -which normally lack such services- credit unions help secure growth...

This overview of the first 40 years of the Inter-American Development Bank shows that the main source of financing for development in Latin America and the Caribbean has been an innovative and flexible institution.Abstract: Esta es una reseña de los primeros 40 años de actividad del Banco...

The IDB Group, guided by its Strategy for Microenterprise Development, has made the creation of a sustainable market of services to the sector one of its most important priorities during the past decade. This report presents an overview of the contributions the IDB has made to the...

This paper marshals substantial arguments and data to support the contention that improving the access of micro and small enterprises to financial services could have an important salutary impact on a country's income distribution. To demonstrate this, the paper shows first that many poor own or...

This paper presents a synopsis of the current state of the microfinance industry in Latin America. It provides a rough assessment of the achievement and outreach of the industry; it offers revealing information on the financial performance of 20 microfinance institutions; and it outlines some of...

This paper studies the effect of government-backed partial credit guarantees on firms' performance. These guarantees are automatically granted to firms without enough collateral in order to lift their credit constraints. We put together a panel, covering the period 1997-2007, that combines data...

The goal of this paper is to study the link between bank credit (and internal funding) and average firm size in Argentina. Besides the fact that economic growth tends to go hand in hand with larger firm size, the topic is of particular interest because of the severe credit crunch in Argentina in...

Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

High delinquency rate of publicly provided mortgages in social housing programs are often interpreted to be due to moral hazard. In this working paper, the authors show that the typically used parametric approaches give misleading results due to overlooked confounding and selection biases. As...

The literature on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) finance highlights linkages with large firms in value chains as a possible way to enhance access to credit. However, much of the literature on value chains emphasizes issues of coordination and governance of those linkages and their...