This timely Handbook collates a range of evidence from top scholars in the field to help readers understand who microfinance reaches, how it helps, and why clients come back. It offers updated views on important concepts that enable a broader framework for understanding poverty and the corresponding financial needs of poor households. Chapters cover recent findings on social impacts, the role of gender, fairness of interest rates, financial resilience in emergencies, and financial education, to provide a thorough coverage of key areas of the field. The Handbook focuses on delivery mechanisms for financial services including group liability lending, agent banking, and digital finance, as well as the special role of value chain finance and insurance for smallholder agriculture. The case studies from both developed and developing countries and regions, illustrating the novel aspects of the link between microfinance, financial inclusion and development will make this a critical read for economics and development studies scholars. The practitioner views on the role of microfinance included in the Handbook will also make this a relevant and useful read for policy makers and practitioners in the area

This book examines the economic impact and the political economy of foreign investment in the United States and of American investment abroad. It provides quantitative estimates and qualitative descriptions of the sources and uses of those funds and, in the process, an analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the New York and London stock exchanges and of the evolution of the American domestic capital market. Finally, it explores the domestic political response to foreign investment in Latin America, in Canada, and in the United States.

This work is a study of the capital transfers to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries and, for the latter decades of that period, of the transfers from the United States to the rest of the world, particularly Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America. It provides a quantitative estimate of the level and industrial composition of those transfers, and qualitative descriptions of the sources and uses of those funds; and it attempts to assess the role of those foreign transfers on the economic development of the recipient economies. In the process, it describes the evolution of the American domestic capital market. Finally, the book explores the issue of domestic political response to foreign investment, attempting to explain why, given the obvious benefits of such investment, the political reaction was so negative and so intense in Latin America and in the American West, but so positive in Canada and the eastern United States.