What type of microfinance institutions supply savings products?

Anastasia Cozarenco (1) , Marek Hudon (2) , Ariane Szafarz (2)

1 MRM - Montpellier Research in Management
2 ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles

Recent evidence shows that the poor desperately need access to savings products. But despite this general consensus, microfinance institutions (MFIs) offering savings products are still under-studied. Using random-effect probit estimation on a dataset of 722 MFIs active over the 2005\textendash2010 period, we try to identify the characteristics of those that collect voluntary savings. Our results suggest that these MFIs have received fewer subsidies than their credit-only counterparts. In other words, subsidies would crowd out micro-savings products, suggesting that donors generate negative externalities on product diversification.

Mots clés: Micro-savings; Microfinance; Savings; Subsidies

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]

Anastasia Cozarenco, Marek Hudon, Ariane Szafarz. What type of microfinance institutions supply savings products?. Economics Letters, 2016, 140, pp.57-59. ⟨10.1016/j.econlet.2016.01.013⟩. ⟨hal-02010655⟩