This paper discusses why Nicaragua is today one of the poorest countries in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean. Lack of sustained economic growth is viewed as the main cause of poverty in the country. The effects of political conflicts on the breaks of the long term growth path are...

El objetivo del presente estudio es analizar el funcionamiento del sistema de microcréditos en Cabo Verde en su papel de instrumento de lucha contra la pobreza. Abordamos los microcréditos desde un punto de vista social y financiero. Para ello, viajamos y encuestamos a una muestra...

In his new book Professor Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank founder and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, proposes a novel strategy for the elimination of poverty worldwide. This strategy relies on the presumed effectiveness of what he calls “social business” in transforming the nature of the...

There are few studies of the social and economic consequences of remittances from migrant workers on poverty and inequality in their home country until recently, especially in Haiti. The known amount of remittances sent to Haiti by the Haitian diaspora has surpassed one billion U.S. dollars in...

Previous studies that aim to determine factors impacting the deposit insurer's loss arising from bank failures use standard econometric techniques that assume the losses are homogeneously driven by the same set of explanatory variables: However, deposit insurers are particularly concerned about...

In this paper we design the neural network consumer credit scoring models for financial institutions where data usually used in previous research are not available. We use extensive primarily accounting data set on transactions and account balances of clients available in each financial...

By assuming a Pareto-type distribution of bank sizes within banking systems, we investigate the effect of changes to Zipf's slope parameter (a) and the sample size to the behaviour of different concentration indexes, such as the 3-bank concentration ratio, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and the...

Deposit insurers are particularly concerned about high-cost failures. When the factors driving such failures differ systematically from the determinants of low- and moderate-cost failures, a new estimation technique is required. Using a sample of more than 1,000 bank failures in the U.S. between...

Assuming a Pareto-type distribution of bank sizes, we investigate the effect of changes in Zipf's exponent (agrave;3B1) and the sample size on the behaviour of different concentration indices, such as the 3-bank concentration ratio, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and the top 5%-concentration...

This paper derives indicators of the severity and structure of banking system risk from asymptotic interdependencies between banks' equity prices. We use new tools available from multivariate extreme value theory to estimate individual banks' exposure to each other (quot;contagion riskquot;) and...