Abstract

MARCONATTO, Diego; CRUZ, Luciano  and  PEDROZO, Eugenio. Expanding the core insight of microfinance lending groups: towards a new multilevel framework. Economia Global e Gestão [online]. 2012, vol.17, n.3, pp.107-120. ISSN 0873-7444.

The lending groups (LGs) have been created upon the insight that their arrangement has the capacity to reduce the information asymmetry and enforcement problems which drive poor borrowers out of traditional banks. We aim to expand on this insight, proposing that the success of LGs depends not only on their structural arrangement, but also on the positive configuration of their macro (institutional environment), meso (borrowers’ social networks) and micro contextual levels (cognitive frameworks of borrowers and microfinance institutions’ (MFI)s key workers). We present seven effects that connect all three levels in a tentative multilevel framework and provide a real example of how the model works.

Keywords : Lending Groups; Microfinance; Multilevel Framework.

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