Microfinance: The Next Bubble?
Margolis, M.

The international financial crisis has destroyed many certainties, but one of the touted survivors is the old saw that small is beautiful. Sure, no one is flogging mansions to paupers anymore. But microfinance is still flourishing, and even expanding. Ever since Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus started handing out small loans to the poor in 1974, the idea that a little credit can help peasants and simple villagers climb out of poverty has swept the map.

Civic groups, the World Bank, even commercial lenders have gotten into the act, capturing millions of barefoot clients across the developing world. Today microfinance is a global growth industry. It reaped Yunus the Nobel prize. Even the developed world is catching on. Grameen Bank, the Bangladesh-based microlender Yunus founded, opened a branch in Queens, New York, last year and plans to unveil another in Omaha, Nebraska. Take that, Citicorp.

But hold that confetti. Two US economists - David Roodman, of the Center for Global Development, and Jonathan Morduch, of New York University - recently reran the numbers on microfinance’s heralded miracles and came away with a much murkier picture. After reviewing seminal studies on microcredit in Bangladesh, they concluded in a working paper that while microcredit is not hurting people, there is also no hard evidence that it is helping them much.

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