authors worked with a bank in the Philippines to conduct a field experiment to examine these issues. They randomly assigned …

environment conducive to the development of sustainable microfinance institutions. The experience of Ghana and the Philippines … Regulating Microfinance Institutions," WPS 2061, February 1999) presented a regulatory framework that identifies thresholds in … financial intermediation activities that trigger a requirement for a microfinance institution to satisfy external or mandatory …

key microfinance approaches in India, taking a close look at the most dominant among these, the Self Help Group (SHG) Bank …: India's rural poor currently have very little access to finance from formal sources. Microfinance approaches have tried to … microfinance approaches to coexist. Private sector microfinanciers need to acquire greater professionalism, and the government can …

?" that microcredit for women had significant, favorable effects on poverty reduction. In this paper the authors show that …

poverty, especially in rural areas and among the unemployed, self-employed, and rural low-educated. The Philippines is found …Since the early 1980s the Philippines has undertaken substantial trade reform. The current Doha Round of World Trade … detailed economywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to run a series of policy experiments. They find that poverty …

Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A … context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical … evidence that the contrary holds and that the national poverty line is more appropriate for comparing living standards among …

), analysts and institutions are confronted with the question of whether and how to use them for global poverty estimation. The … world. This paper presents evidence that if the global poverty line is updated with the 2011 PPP data based on the same set … of national poverty lines that define the $1.25 line in 2005 PPPs, and if the 2011 PPP conversion factors are used …

In 1993, in response to persistent unemployment, and rising poverty and social unrest, the government of Albania … introduced an anti-poverty program, namely Ndihma Ekonomike; in 1995 it was extended to all poor households. This paper estimates … subjective measures of household poverty. The analysis uses the nationally representative Albanian Living Standards Measurement …

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better … data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what "poverty" means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than … we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence of continually declining poverty incidence and depth since the …

At the outset of China's reform period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for Africa as a whole. Within … five years that was no longer true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty …