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 describes how many countries in East Asia established from 1945 onwards a very successful local financial system, starting with Japan. These local financial systems played a key role in bringing about the so-called 'East Asian miracle'. From the 1980s onwards, however, many East Asian...

An overview -- Introduction / Milford Bateman, Stephanie Blankenburg and Richard Kozul-Wright -- Development prospects in an era of financialization / Richard Kozul-Wright -- Microcredit and development / Milford Bateman -- Country case studies -- Looking through the glass, darkly : microcredit...

There is a growing consensus that the historical evidence shows that development and growth require the impetus provided by a functioning developmental state. Originally conceived through East Asian examples (Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) as a ‘top-down' intervention undertaken by a pilot...

The international donor community arrived in post-apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s to restructure the economy along neoliberal lines. One of the most important of the interventions it promoted was microcredit, which was widely seen as one of the principal self-help solutions to the...

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...

This paper looks at the financing of local economic development and what history says are the best models. It compares the success of more interventionist local financial models to more recent but unsuccessful neoliberal-inspired local financial models, such as microfinance

One of the central claims of the new generation of neoliberal economists that emerged in the 1960s, especially in the USA, was that market-driven private sector financial institutions were by far the most effective at intermediating capital into the most productive uses (Friedman, 1962; McKinnon,...