Design and sustainability issues of rural credit and savings programs

Joint liability group lending is currently the lending technology of choice of microfinance institutions because of the success of the Grameen Bank, which is using the technology to successfully lend to millions of poor Bangladeshi women. The analysis and findings presented in this brief are the results of research undertaken by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Bunda College of Agriculture on the practice and performance of joint liability group lending in Malawi. This research provides evidence on the extent to which peer selection, peer monitoring, and peer pressure are taking place in the credit groups affiliated to the Malawi Rural Finance Company (MRFC), the main microfinance institution in Malawi, and their impact on the joint liability on loan repayment. authorities have on the formation and com-positionCredit Malawi. ,Grameen Bank. ,Technology. ,Microenterprises Malawi Finance. ,Finance Developing countries. ,Rural credit Developing countries. ,Financial institutions. ,

Taking a New Look at Empirical Models of Adoption: Average Treatment Effect Estimation of Adoption Rates and their Determinants

This paper shows that the observed sample adoption rate does not consistently estimate the population adoption rate even if the sample is random. It is proved that instead the sample adoption rate is a consistent estimate of the population joint exposure and adoption rate, which does not inform about adoption per se. Likewise, it is shown that a model of adoption with observed adoption outcome as dependent variable and where exposure to the technology is not observed and controlled for cannot yield consistent estimates of the determinants of adoption. Such model can at best provide consistent estimates of the effects of the included explanatory variables on joint exposure and adoption. Even for that to be possible, the model must be explicitly specified as a model of determinants of joint exposure and adoption and not as a model of determinants of adoption alone. The paper uses the counterfactual outcomes framework to show that the true population adoption rate corresponds to what is defined in the modern treatment effect literature as the average treatment effect (ATE), which measures the effect or impact of a "treatment" on a person randomly selected in the population. In the adoption context, a "treatment" corresponds to exposure to the technology. Another quantity that is also the subject of attention in the treatment effect literature is the average treatment effect on the treated, which measures the effect of treatment in the treated subpopulation and corresponds in the adoption context to the adoption rate among those exposed to the technology. The paper uses the ATE estimation framework to derive consistent nonparametric and parametric estimators of population adoption rates and their determinants and applies the results to consistently estimate the population adoption rates and determinants of the NERICA (New Rice for Africa) rice varieties in Cote d'ivoire.Technology Adoption, Rice, NERICA, West Africa, Average Treatment Effect, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, C8, O3, Q12, Q16, Q55,

Access to credit and its impact on welfare in Malawi:

Poor rural households in developing countries lack adequate access to credit. Many development professionals believe that this lack of credit has negative consequences for poor people's agricultural productivity, food security, health, and overall household welfare. Improved access to credit, they argue, will help poor rural households engage in more productive income-generating activities both on and off the farm and raise their living standards. Community and member-based microfinance programs have thus enjoyed considerable political and financial support during the 1990s. Yet in Access to Credit and Its Impact on Welfare in Malawi, Aliou Diagne and Manfred Zeller argue that access to microcredit may not be an effective way of alleviating poverty if the necessary infrastructure and socioeconomic environment are lacking.Rural poor Malawi., Agricultural credit Malawi., Agricultural policies., Developing countries., Small business Developing countries Finance.,

Control and State Estimation of the One-Phase Stefan Problem via Backstepping Design

This paper develops a control and estimation design for the one-phase Stefan problem. The Stefan problem represents a liquid-solid phase transition as time evolution of a temperature profile in a liquid-solid material and its moving interface. This physical process is mathematically formulated as a diffusion partial differential equation (PDE) evolving on a time-varying spatial domain described by an ordinary differential equation (ODE). The state-dependency of the moving interface makes the coupled PDE-ODE system a nonlinear and challenging problem. We propose a full-state feedback control law, an observer design, and the associated output-feedback control law via the backstepping method. The designed observer allows estimation of the temperature profile based on the available measurement of solid phase length. The associated output-feedback controller ensures the global exponential stability of the estimation errors, the H1- norm of the distributed temperature, and the moving interface to the desired setpoint under some explicitly given restrictions on the setpoint and observer gain. The exponential stability results are established considering Neumann and Dirichlet boundary actuations.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro