Comparative review of microfinance regulatory framework issues in Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania

The authors investigate the microfinance regulatory regimes in Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania, with a view to identifying key issues and lessons on how the overall regulatory framework affects integration of microfinance institutions into the financial system. The authors find that recognizing different tiers of both regulated and unregulated institutions in a financial structure facilitates financial deepening and outreach to otherwise underserved groups in urban and rural areas. That environment promotes sustainable microfinance under shared performance standards and encourages regulatory authorities to develop appropriate prudential regulations and staff capacity. Case studies of the three countries raise important issues on promoting microfinance development vis-à-vis regulating them. Laws to regulate activities other than intermediation of public deposits into loans can result in disproportionately restrictive and unmanageable standards, even as dynamic microfinance sectors have emerged without conducive regulatory regimes. The authors use the three countries'regulatory experiences to highlight the importance of differentiating when prudential supervision is warranted and when regulatory oversight suffices, and to identify the agencies to carry out regulation. They address an important issue that has received scant attention, measuring and paying for the costs of regulating microfinance, and the need to build technical capacity of supervisory and regulatory staff.Banks&Banking Reform,Rural Finance,Financial Intermediation,Microfinance,Private Participation in Infrastructure

Discourse as planned action

A remark fits into a discourse if it can be interpreted as a plan-advancing act given the world around the speakers. their intentions. and the prior discourse. Teleological questions about discourse such as "Why did X make this utterance here? " must have answers such as "Because X wanted to do so-and-so". When there is no surh answer. the discourse will be incomprehensible. The proper sort of explanation to give is to talk about the speaker's plans and the alterations he intends in his interlocutor's plans. To do this one must have an account of what a plan is. how it can be changed by changes in its maker's beliefs and values. how utterances can make such changes. and when such changes count as benefits for the speaker. Such an account is offered. The interlocutors must have recursive beliefs (beliefs about each others' beliefs). But often a special simple case of recursive belief can be used. Then recursive belief can be factored out of the problem of explaining how utterances change plans. A proof of sufficient condition for this special case to arise is given. Indirect communication can occur if a speaker forces his hearer to change the plans the hearer supposes the speaker to have. This happens because being known to have a plan entails being known to have certain beliefs. Some discourse events are constituted bV changes that occur to the plans of Speakers in the discourse as a result of what is said. Examples are given. Some process accounts of the recognition of utterances as goal-directed attempts to change plans are considered

Patient and community nurse perspectives on recruitment to a randomized controlled trial of urinary catheter washout solutions

Aims To provide evidence around the acceptability of a proposed randomised controlled trial (RCT) of catheter washout solutions. Design: A sample of senior community nursing staff (n=7) were interviewed and four focus groups with a sample of community nurses were conducted. Eleven semi-structured face-to-face interviews were undertaken with patients using a long-term catheter. Methods: An in-depth qualitative study using a phenomenological approach was employed. This approach was suitable to explore the lived experiences of subjects and gain their viewpoints and experiences. Results: Nurse participants raised concerns regarding the removal of treatment or increased risk of infection in relation to which arm of the trial patients were randomised to. There was concern that patients could get used to the increased contact with nursing staff. Six patients who agreed to participate cited personal benefit, benefiting others, and a sense of indifference. Four patients were unsure about taking part and one declined

Painting Analysis Using Wavelets and Probabilistic Topic Models

In this paper, computer-based techniques for stylistic analysis of paintings are applied to the five panels of the 14th century Peruzzi Altarpiece by Giotto di Bondone. Features are extracted by combining a dual-tree complex wavelet transform with a hidden Markov tree (HMT) model. Hierarchical clustering is used to identify stylistic keywords in image patches, and keyword frequencies are calculated for sub-images that each contains many patches. A generative hierarchical Bayesian model learns stylistic patterns of keywords; these patterns are then used to characterize the styles of the sub-images; this in turn, permits to discriminate between paintings. Results suggest that such unsupervised probabilistic topic models can be useful to distill characteristic elements of style.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ICIP 201

Ohio County - Place Names

A historical survey of place names and list of post offices in Ohio County, Kentucky

Informal-formal linkages in market and street trading in Accra

This paper investigates the ways in which linkages between the informal and formal segments of an economy may yield benefits to or impose costs upon informal workers, based on views of informal traders in Accra regarding their relationships with the formal economy and its institutions. The data are drawn from the Informal Economy Monitoring Study (IEMS), with a World Bank study of informal household enterprises providing context for the IEMS-Ghana study and a basis for interpretation of its findings. Data from 15 focus groups and a survey of 150 traders from both central and non-central locations of Accra, Ghana, are analysed in terms of traders’ relationship to the value chain, non-government institutions, government and the macroeconomy. The last two are found to exert a strong, mostly negative influence on informal operators, offset to some extent by support from member-based organizations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Access to loans from microfinance institutions was an important influence on traders’ work and was viewed both positively and negatively. Although there are few visible direct linkages between informal operators and formal firms, they are to some extent mutually interdependent as retailers and suppliers in the value chain. Taking advantage of the potential synergy in informal-formal linkages will require government and other actors to become more proactive in facilitating, rather than denying, infrastructure, support services and adequate space for informal traders. The probability of such an outcome depends on the ability of informal traders to organise themselves.Keywords: Informal economy; Informal-formal linkages; Market traders; Street vendors; Ghan

Multiple-membership multiple-classification models for social network and group dependences

The social network literature on network dependences has largely ignored other sources of dependence, such as the school that a student attends, or the area in which an individual lives. The multilevel modelling literature on school and area dependences has, in turn, largely ignored social networks. To bridge this divide, a multiple-membership multiple-classification modelling approach for jointly investigating social network and group dependences is presented. This allows social network and group dependences on individual responses to be investigated and compared. The approach is used to analyse a subsample of the Adolescent Health Study data set from the USA, where the response variable of interest is individual level educational attainment, and the three individual level covariates are sex, ethnic group and age. Individual, network, school and area dependences are accounted for in the analysis. The network dependences can be accounted for by including the network as a classification in the model, using various network configurations, such as ego-nets and cliques. The results suggest that ignoring the network affects the estimates of variation for the classifications that are included in the random part of the model (school, area and individual), as well as having some influence on the point estimates and standard errors of the estimates of regression coefficients for covariates in the fixed part of the model. From a substantive perspective, this approach provides a flexible and practical way of investigating variation in an individual level response due to social network dependences, and estimating the share of variation of an individual response for network, school and area classifications