MICROFINANCE AND PUBLIC POLICY: OUTREACH, PERFORMANCE AND EFFICIENCY

Book Details

• Publisher: Rawat Publications

• Author: Bernd Balkenhol

• Language: English

• Edition: 2025

• ISBN: 9781349961238

• Pages: 250

• Cover: Hardback

About the Book

This insightful volume delves into the crucial relationship between efficiency and sustainability in microfinance institutions (MFIs). While MFIs aim to empower the poor by offering them financial tools to manage risk and foster income-generating opportunities, they must also remain financially viable to expand their impact. The book highlights that in some cases, MFIs can achieve scale and sustainability simultaneously, but in challenging contexts—especially rural and sparsely populated areas—breaking even can be difficult regardless of operational efficiency.

This book advocates for efficiency as a guiding principle in public policy, offering a pragmatic framework that accommodates both financial performance and social impact. Through a blend of conceptual analysis and empirical evidence, it examines how efficiency in financial intermediation is measured, and how policy interventions can create incentives for sustainable impact.

Notable contributors, including Jonathan Morduch, Thorsten Beck, and Flavio Comim, enrich this volume with discussions on smart subsidies, trade-offs in poverty outreach, and efficiency measurement techniques such as Data Envelopment Analysis and Factor Analysis. The book further presents detailed country-specific case studies from regions such as Mali, Morocco, Eastern Europe, and Chile, offering a global perspective on microfinance effectiveness.

Edited by Bernd Balkenhol, Director of the Social Finance program at the International Labour Office, this volume is a must-read for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how financial systems can balance economic and social goals to serve the most vulnerable communities effectively.