Microfinance: A Comprehensive Review of the Existing Literature

Although the word finance is in the term microfinance, and the core elements of microfinance are those of the finance discipline, microfinance has yet to break into the mainstream or entrepreneurial finance literature. The purpose of this article is to introduce the finance academic community to the discipline of microfinance and microfinance institutions (MFIs). We provide a comprehensive review of over 350 articles and address the issues of MFI sustainability, products and services, management practices, clientele targeting, regulation and policy, and impact assessment

Fiscal decentralisation and IDC economic growth: An empirical investigation

The impact of fiscal decentralisation on LDC economic growth and development is widely debated in the development literature. Notwithstanding this, there has been little attempt to test systematically this relationship. Accordingly, in this note we present an empirical examination of the relationship between the level of fiscal decentralisation and economic growth rates across a sample of twenty-three LDCsfrom 1974 to 1991. We fail to find, however, any strong, systematic relationship between the two among our sample of LDCs.