This book represents the first comprehensive effort to analyze informal finance in Peru. We gathered data from a survey designed to capture formal and non-formal credit and savings transactions. We surveyed rural households, urban micro entrepreneurs, and wholesalers from three regions: Junin,...

This book reviews the theory and practice of rural finance in the Latin American and Caribbean region. It explains why rural financial markets function the way they do and what changes would be needed to make improvements. It also provides an in-depth assessment of the policy and institutional...

This paper reviews the main causes of the rapid growth of credit in Peru during the 1990s. The creation of new types of lending intermediaries besides traditional banks has allowed debt to increase and credit to be extended to new classes of borrowers such as middle and lower-class urban...