Purpose - The issue of which financial initial conditions are necessary to materialize the benefits of financial globalization remains open to debate in the literature. In this paper, we try to put some empirical structure on the concept of financial threshold conditions in order to give...

This paper investigates whether the country-level financial environment in which microfinance institutions (MFIs) have to work affects their operations. In particular, we argue that the efficiency of MFIs is determined by the extent to which financial markets of countries are developed. On the...

As the flow of financial aid from the industrial countries may be expected to shrink rapidly as a consequence of their economic difficulties, the developing countries will have to find out possibilities of using their own financial resources more effectively. In this connection the task of...