Purpose – This paper is about the dynamics of rural development in Bangladesh. The purpose of this paper is to epitomize the scenario of manipulative design in the presence of three influential policy actors, such as bureaucracy, political leadership and tycoons. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate causal link between social capital and microfinance by testing the role of social capital in explaining the household's access to microcredit under the group‐based lending approach. Design/methodology/approach – Household level primary data...

Poverty is still a predominantly rural phenomenon. However, the context of rural poverty has been changing across the world, with high growth in some economies and stagnation in others. Furthermore, increased openness in many economies has affected the specific role of agricultural growth for...

This paper describes different types of rural microfinance institutions, and examines their comparative advantages as well as related challenges to and strategies for deepening rural financial systems. The focus is not about which type of institution is better or worse for a particular target...

This article offers some perspective on the progress and challenges of managing catastrophic weather risk in lower income countries through the use of index insurance. Innovations in insurance for natural disaster risk are critically important to help the rural poor improve their lives and to...

Changes within the financial services industry have raised concerns about the ability of agricultural banks to adequately fund local rural development. To address these concerns, the Gramm‐Leach‐Bliley Act of 1999 broadened agricultural bank access to Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) financing....

Purpose Recent research into enterprise performance has focussed on the importance of firm proximity to total productivity. Using spatial correlation of firm performance as a proxy for knowledge transfers and diffusion, the purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence for these spatial...

Purpose – What this paper aims to tackle is how much did the return of rural migrant labor during the financial crisis affect China's GDP and the growth rate of the national economy. Design/methodology/approach – This paper constructs a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and uses...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to apply a poverty level decomposition approach to decompose the poverty by income sources and investigate the impact of government transfers on income inequality and rural poverty. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the decomposition method...

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the effect of rural-urban income gap on agricultural growth in China and its dynamics over time and across regions since reform and opening up. Design/methodology/approach – Two types of indices are constructed to measure the rural-urban income gap:...