Searching for sustainable microfinance : a review of five Indonesian initiatives

Expanding the microfinance market can promote economic growth and reduce poverty in many countries. But expanding this market is advantageous only if the increased activity is sustainable. The author draws lessons from five Indonesian microfinance initiatives in rural areas and proposes ways for governments and donors to support the microfinance sector. Those programs demonstrate that microfinance initiatives can provide a valuable service to low-income people at a temporary, affordable cost to governments of donors. Incentives for customers and staff are key features of successful microfinance operations that enable them to operate with low subsidies or on a self-sustaining basis. Programs should also charge adequate real interest rates, aggressively pursue repayment, and achieve a significant volume of business. To accelerate progress toward self-sustainability, programs can track the subsidies they receive, and their supporters can impose hard budget constraints and declining subvention support. Government-owned microfinance initiatives are vulnerable to political pressures that undermine their commitment to sound banking practices. Granting these institutions autonomous status, imposing hard budget constraints, and privatizing them when they are financially sustainable, can reduce their susceptibility to political influences. Alternatively, governments and donors could support the sector through temporary subsidies to private sector initiatives to help them defray start-up costs. Supervision can be improved if a country's microfinance industry, assisted by its central bank, establishes industrywide standards. Microfinance institutions could contract for supervision services from commercial banks. The central bank could monitor supervisors to ensure that they exercise due diligence. This study finds that institutions can efficiently reach clients in remote areas through subdistrict-based units and field staff. They need not rely on group lending techniques, savings requirements, or intermediary organizations between banks and borrowers to boost efficiency. Initiatives can serve female borrowers without targeted marketing if loan products meet women's needs and are accessible to them. Governments could increase the usefulness of microfinance to agriculture by encouraging state-owned microfinance institutions to develop and pilot-test loan products that meet smallholders'needs.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Rural Finance,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Microfinance,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Microfinance,Private Participation in Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Rural Finance

Signal Transmission in the Auditory System

Contains table of contents for Section 3, an introduction and reports on nine research projects.National Institutes of Health Grant 5 T32 NS07047National Institutes of Health Grant 5 P01 NS13126National Institutes of Health Grant 8 R01 DC00194National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 NS25995National Institutes of Health Grant 8 R01 DC00238National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 NS20322National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00235National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 NS20269National Institutes of Health Grant 1 P01 NS23734Johnson and Johnson FoundationUnisys Corporation Doctoral Fellowshi

Internally coupled ears in living mammals.

It is generally held that the right and left middle ears of mammals are acoustically isolated from each other, such that mammals must rely on neural computation to derive sound localisation cues. There are, however, some unusual species in which the middle ear cavities intercommunicate, in which case each ear might be able to act as a pressure-difference receiver. This could improve sound localisation at lower frequencies. The platypus Ornithorhynchus is apparently unique among mammals in that its tympanic cavities are widely open to the pharynx, a morphology resembling that of some non-mammalian tetrapods. The right and left middle ear cavities of certain talpid and golden moles are connected through air passages within the basicranium; one experimental study on Talpa has shown that the middle ears are indeed acoustically coupled by these means. Having a basisphenoid component to the middle ear cavity walls could be an important prerequisite for the development of this form of interaural communication. Little is known about the hearing abilities of platypus, talpid and golden moles, but their audition may well be limited to relatively low frequencies. If so, these mammals could, in principle, benefit from the sound localisation cues available to them through internally coupled ears. Whether or not they actually do remains to be established experimentally.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00422-015-0675-