Macroeconomic factors influencing interest rates of microfinance institutions in Latin America

Karel Janda and Pavel Zetek

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Agricultural output in developing countries still represents a substantial part of GDP. This ratio has actually increased in some areas such as Latin America. As such, there is an increasing importance of microfinance institutions (MFIs) focusing on activities associated with agriculture and encouraging entrepreneurship in agriculture and in the rural communities in general. The contribution of microfinance institutions consists mainly in providing special-purpose loans, usually without collateral. However, questions exist as to the magnitude and adequate level of risk of providing micro-credit loans in relation to the interest rates being charged. We review two main approaches to setting interest rates in MFIs. One approach takes the view that interest rates should be set at a high level due to the excessive risk that these institutions undertake. The second approach is to convince the public of the possibility of reducing these rates through cost savings, increased efficiency, and sharing best practice, etc. Subsequently we econometrically analyse the impact of macroeconomic factors on microfinance interest rates in Latin America and the Caribbean. We show that these results depend on the chosen indicator of interest rate.

Keywords: microfinance; interest rate; macroeconomic factors; agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 G21 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-dev, nep-lam, nep-mac and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/49973/1/MPRA_paper_49973.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:49973

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().