Financial technology, or simply ‘fin-tech', is increasingly seen as one of the key tools to facilitate poverty reduction and local economic development. One article in particular by Tavneet Suri and William Jack published in the leading publication Science has played a hugely influential role...

This paper is an evaluation of the Local Economic Development Agency (LEDA) model and network operating in Latin America with UNDP support. Originating in the 1980s as one of the supposedly transforming institutions linked to the neoliberal revolution, the commercialised LEDA model was one of...

Microcredit was once universally lauded in international development community circles as a ‘magic bullet'. Using the example of South Africa, this paper shows that microcredit has actually been an ‘anti-developmental' local financial model, and one of the most calamitous financial sector...

This working paper is produced within the project framework of the Employment Regeneration Programme funded by the EAR, undertaken under the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, and contracted to IMC Consulting Ltd (EuropeAid/114770/D/SV/KOS). It is intended to promote greater discussion about...

Although once universally lauded in international development community circles as a ‘magic bullet', in recent years the concept of microcredit has been increasingly recognised as having had a number of seriously adverse impacts in precisely those countries, regions and localities wherein it...

This paper examines the effectiveness of the Local Economic Development Agency (LEDA) model of institutional support for local economic development (LED), a model of LED that became very popular in the 1990's as the neoliberal political project began its global ascendancy. The paper draws upon...

One of the decisive but often overlooked factors in the creation of the East Asian ‘economic miracle’ was the part played by a variety of heterodox sub-national state, community and cooperatively owned and controlled financial systems, institutions and lending models. Beginning with Japan...

The poverty reduction and developmental role of land titles has been a contested issue since the concept was popularised in the early 2000s by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and the World Bank. Among other things, land titles were held to provide vital local economic development impetus...

The contemporary model of microfinance has its roots in a small local experiment in Bangladesh in the early 1970s undertaken by Dr Muhammad Yunus, the US-educated Bangladeshi economist and future 2006 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient. Yunus's idea of supporting tiny informal microenterprises and...