Microfinance, Social Capital and Gender Equality

This is the paper on microfinance and poverty that I wrote to complete my course in Economics of Development, taught by Mark Wessel. Thanks to Mark's guidance, I gained a deeper understanding on poverty, inequality and its relation with the financial system. Some of my friends interested in microfinance asked me to share it with them, so I'm putting the file up for download.

Yunus has always been an inspiration to me, so when Mark required us to write a paper on a country and its economic issues, I seized on the chance to write a study on Bangladesh and microfinance. This is the result. If you use the paper, kindly link back to this URL. If you like or dislike the paper, please post a comment.

This paper aims to understand poverty from the framework of development economics, using Bangladesh as a focal case study. We will do this by answering the following questions:

1. What economic and social factors contribute to inequality and poverty in Bangladesh?
2. What specific issues did microcredit address in Bangladesh that the formal financial system did not?
3. What lessons can be drawn from the experience of microfinance as a tool for alleviating poverty?
   

Read or download file at Scribd.

Thinking Micro: Poverty Alleviation through Microfinance, Social Capital and 
Gender Equality in Bangladesh by Ruben Canlas Jr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.