Access to credit and its impact on welfare in Malawi

Poor rural households in developing countries lack adequate access to credit. Many development professionals believe that this lack of credit has negative consequences for poor people's agricultural productivity, food security, health, and overall household welfare. Improved access to credit, they argue, will help poor rural households engage in more productive income-generating activities both on and off the farm and raise their living standards. Community and member-based microfinance programs have thus enjoyed considerable political and financial support during the 1990s. Yet in Access to Credit and Its Impact on Welfare in Malawi, Aliou Diagne and Manfred Zeller argue that access to microcredit may not be an effective way of alleviating poverty if the necessary infrastructure and socioeconomic environment are lacking.

[1]  V. Hajivassiliou,et al.  Smooth unbiased multivariate probability simulators for maximum likelihood estimation of limited dependent variable models , 1993 .

[2]  Daniel McFadden,et al.  Modelling the Choice of Residential Location , 1977 .

[3]  S. Cosslett,et al.  1 Estimation from endogenously stratified samples , 1993 .

[4]  J. Stock,et al.  Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments , 1994 .

[5]  A. Deaton.  Saving and Liquidity Constraints , 1989 .

[6]  Iucaa Library.  Annual Report - 1993-94 , 1994 .

[7]  M. Zeller.  Determinants of credit rationing: A study of informal lenders and formal credit groups in Madagascar , 1994 .

[8]  Dir.,et al.  Corporate profile , 1993, American biotechnology laboratory.

[9]  M. Hossain.  Credit for aileviation of rural poverty : The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh , 1988 .

[10]  A. Diagne.  DETERMINANTS OF HOUSEHOLD ACCESS TO AND PARTICIPATION IN FORMAL AND INFORMAL CREDIT MARKETS IN MALAWI , 1999 .

[11]  J. Stock,et al.  Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments , 1994 .

[12]  Peter Schmidt,et al.  The Theory and Practice of Econometrics , 1985 .

[13]  Charles F. Manski,et al.  Alternative Estimators and Sample Designs for Discrete Choice Analysis , 1981 .

[14]  D. W. Adams,et al.  Rural financial markets in low-income countries: Recent controversies and lessons , 1986 .

[15]  Gregory M. Duncan.  Formulation and Statistical Analysis of the Mixed, Continuous/Discrete Dependent Variable Model in Classical Production Theory , 1980 .

[16]  Christopher Udry,et al.  Risk and Insurance in a Rural Credit Market: An Empirical Investigation in Northern Nigeria , 1994 .

[17]  J. Sijm.  Food Security and Policy Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from the Past Two Decades , 1997 .

[18]  J. Kadane.  Structural Analysis of Discrete Data with Econometric Applications , 1984 .

[19]  Manfred Zeller,et al.  Market access by smallholder farmers in Malawi: implications for technology adoption, agricultural productivity and crop income , 1998 .

[20]  M. Ivimey.  Annual report , 1958, IRE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech.

[21]  Zvi Griliches,et al.  Unobservables with a Variance-Components Structure: Ability, Schooling, and the Economic Success of Brothers , 1975 .

[22]  C. Udry.  Risk and Saving in Northern Nigeria by , 1996 .

[23]  Manohar P. Sharma,et al.  Rural finance and poverty alleviation , 1998 .

[24]  R. Meyer,et al.  Measuring the farm level impact of agricultural loans. , 1979 .

[25]  Robert A. Moffitt,et al.  Program Evaluation With Nonexperimental Data , 1991 .

[26]  Tullio Jappelli,et al.  Who is Credit Constrained in the U. S. Economy , 1990 .

[27]  J. Guasch,et al.  Rural credit markets and institutions in developing countries: Lessons for policy analysis from practice and modern theory , 1986 .

[28]  M. Zeller,et al.  Rural finance for food security for the poor : implication for research and policy , 1997 .

[29]  Howard D. Leathers,et al.  Maize of the Ancestors and Modern Varieties: The Microeconomics of High-Yielding Variety Adoption in Malawi , 1995, Economic Development and Cultural Change.

[30]  Takeshi Amemiya,et al.  Multivariate Regression and Simultaneous Equation Models when the Dependent Variables Are Truncated Normal , 1974 .

[31]  Mylène Kherallah,et al.  The sequencing of agricultural market reforms in Malawi , 1999 .

[32]  M R Rosenzweig,et al.  Sisters, siblings, and mothers: the effect of teen-age childbearing on birth outcomes in a dynamic family context. , 1995, Econometrica : journal of the Econometric Society.

[33]  M. Zeller.  Determinants of credit rationing , 1994 .

[34]  R. Strauss,et al.  The Prediction of Occupation Using Multiple Logit Models , 1975 .

[35]  Marcel Fafchamps,et al.  Solidarity Networks in Preindustrial Societies: Rational Peasants with a Moral Economy , 1992, Economic Development and Cultural Change.

[36]  I. Singh.  Agricultural household models : extensions, applications, and policy , 1987 .

[37]  D. McFadden.  A Method of Simulated Moments for Estimation of Discrete Response Models Without Numerical Integration , 1989 .

[38]  Kenneth I. Wolpin,et al.  Are There Increasing Returns to the Intergenerational Production of Human Capital? Maternal Schooling and Child Intellectual Achievement , 1994 .

[39]  D. W. Adams,et al.  Undermining Rural Development With Cheap Credit , 1984 .

[40]  S. Khandker,et al.  The impact of Group‐Based Credit Programs on Poor Households in Bangladesh: Does the Gender of Participants Matter? , 1998, Journal of Political Economy.

[41]  Michael Keane,et al.  A Computationally Practical Simulation Estimator for Panel Data , 1994 .

[42]  C. Delgado.  Africa's changing agricultural development strategies: past and present paradigms as a guide to the future , 1995 .

[43]  D. Pollard,et al.  Simulation and the Asymptotics of Optimization Estimators , 1989 .

[44]  Stepen Rhys Cosslett,et al.  Efficient estimation of discrete-choice models from choice-based samples , 1978 .

[45]  J. Lin,et al.  The Relationship between Credit and Productivity in Chinese Agriculture: A Microeconomic Model of Disequilibrium , 1990 .

[46]  Angus Deaton.  Price Elasticities from Survey Data: Extensions and Indonesian Results , 1990 .

[47]  W. R. Buckland,et al.  Distributions in Statistics: Continuous Multivariate Distributions , 1973 .

[48]  Marcel Fafchamps,et al.  Risk Sharing Networks in Rural Philippines , 1997 .

[49]  G. Maddala,et al.  21 A perspective on application of bootstrap methods in econometrics , 1993 .

[50]  Paul A. Ruud,et al.  Simulation of multivariate normal rectangle probabilities and their derivatives theoretical and computational results , 1996 .

[51]  Martin Ravallion,et al.  Reciprocity without commitment: Characterization and performance of informal insurance arrangements , 1993 .

[52]  Melinda Smale,et al.  Institutional Change and Discontinuities in Farmers' Use of Hybrid Maize Seed and Fertilizer in Malawi: Findings from the 1996-97 CIMMYT/ MoALD Survey , 1998 .

[53]  Mukesh Eswaran,et al.  IMPLICATIONS OF CREDIT CONSTRAINTS FOR RISK BEHAVIOUR IN LESS DEVELOPED ECONOMIES , 1990 .

[54]  Wagner A. Kamakura,et al.  Book Review: Structural Analysis of Discrete Data with Econometric Applications , 1982 .

[55]  M. Zeller,et al.  Market access by smallholder farmers in Malawi , 1997 .

[56]  Bronwyn H Hall,et al.  Estimation and Inference in Nonlinear Structural Models , 1974 .

[57]  M. Robinson.  The microfinance revolution , 2001 .

[58]  M. Zeller,et al.  Empirical measurements of households' access to credit and credit constraints in developing countries , 2000 .

[59]  James J. Heckman,et al.  Assessing the Case for Social Experiments , 1995 .

[60]  G. M. Tallis.  The Moment Generating Function of the Truncated Multi‐Normal Distribution , 1961 .

[61]  J. Stiglitz,et al.  Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information , 1981 .

[62]  H. Alderman,et al.  Food Security and Health Security: Explaining the Levels of Nutritional Status in Pakistan , 1994, Economic Development and Cultural Change.

[63]  Akhter U. Ahmed,et al.  Rural finance policies for food security of the poor , 1996 .

[64]  P. Schmidt,et al.  Limited-Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Econometrics. , 1984 .

[65]  Saurabh Sinha,et al.  Informal credit transactions of micro-credit borrowers in rural Bangladesh , 1998 .

[66]  Alain Monfort,et al.  Simulation-based inference: A survey with special reference to panel data models , 1993 .

[67]  Vassilis A. Hajivassiliou,et al.  Simulation Estimation Methods for Limited Dependent Variable Models , 1991 .