This book examines how credit and finance schemes affect the financial lives of vulnerable people around the world. These schemes include payday lending, matched savings, and financial literacy in the Global North, and micro-credit and mobile banking in the Global South. Buckland sets these schemes within the context of financialization and seeks to identify strengths, weaknesses, and ways to enhance the well-being of vulnerable people. This book's coverage of a wide range of financial products and geographic regions makes for a unique and innovative perspective on this topic. It presents a balanced critique of credit and finance schemes under the assumption that reform is the most practical means to improve human well-being.

This book analyzes the highly contentious payday lending industry, presenting valuable new data collected during Canada's recent regulatory reviews and demonstrating its relevance to payday lending conversations taking place worldwide. The authors treat the industry with a balanced hand by establishing its importance as an example of financialization and acknowledging the complex impact of payday lending services on low-income and credit-constrained clients. Up-to-date data from an interdisciplinary mix of financial, econometric, legal, behavioral economic, and socioeconomic sources-all in the context of an established Canadian industry-provide both proponents and opponents of payday lending with valuable evidence for their discussions of how much regulation is required to minimize harmful consequences. These insights from Canada expand a US-centric conversation and provide a key resource for the growing list of countries in which the industry is present, from the UK and Poland to South Africa and Australia.

This book analyzes the highly contentious payday lending industry, presenting valuable new data collected during Canada's recent regulatory reviews and demonstrating its relevance to payday lending conversations taking place worldwide. The authors treat the industry with a balanced hand by establishing its importance as an example of financialization and acknowledging the complex impact of payday lending services on low-income and credit-constrained clients. Up-to-date data from an interdisciplinary mix of financial, econometric, legal, behavioral economic, and socioeconomic sources-all in the context of an established Canadian industry-provide both proponents and opponents of payday lending with valuable evidence for their discussions of how much regulation is required to minimize harmful consequences. These insights from Canada expand a US-centric conversation and provide a key resource for the growing list of countries in which the industry is present, from the UK and Poland to South Africa and Australia.

This book examines how credit and finance schemes affect the financial lives of vulnerable people around the world. These schemes include payday lending, matched savings, and financial literacy in the Global North, and micro-credit and mobile banking in the Global South. Buckland sets these schemes within the context of financialization and seeks to identify strengths, weaknesses, and ways to enhance the well-being of vulnerable people. This book's coverage of a wide range of financial products and geographic regions makes for a unique and innovative perspective on this topic. It presents a balanced critique of credit and finance schemes under the assumption that reform is the most practical means to improve human well-being.

This book examines financial vulnerability: a state in which a person or household cannot absorb any substantial spending or negative income shock without substantial financial and ultimately broader harm such as job loss, emotional harm, or mental illness. The focus of the book is on the experiences of low- income and modest income Canadian families - families which, by virtue of being in the lower income brackets, are particularly at risk of experiencing financial hardship. Looking at vulnerability from a conceptual and empirical lens, this book offers a framework to better understand the complex and interdependent ways in which financial vulnerability emerge and can be addressed. By locating its analysis of individual and household financial management in wider community, cultural, and economic contexts, this book seeks to offer holistic policy recommendations to reduce financial vulnerability, with implications that go beyond Canada and to other developed countries.

The past twenty years - the period of 'neoliberal globalization'- has seen an erosion of farmers' livelihoods and food security around the world. Increasing reliance on markets and modern technology has not generated universal farm affluence. This book brings together an impressive array of statistical evidence to show that neoliberalism has brought about rural depopulation in the North, rising rural poverty in the South and environmental problems all around the farming world. Beginning in the 1980s, neoliberal ideology and accelerated globalization shaped farm policies worldwide. Markets, the cornerstone of neoliberalism, were said to provide higher prices to farmers. But evidence shows that farmgate prices during this period have stagnated. Moreover, market-driven growth has encouraged production of agricultural exports and growing use of chemical inputs. Since world farm prices have been in decline, the consequences for food security and the farm environment are, to say the least, questionable. Neoliberal globalization is also premised on expanding international trade into the realms of agriculture and intellectual property. Evidence shows that trade liberalization - implemented mainly through structural adjustment programs and the WTO - is often biased against Third World farmers and small farmers everywhere. The power of transnational corporations in agricultural trade and farm technology has grown by leaps and bounds. Evidence shows that the corporate-driven GM-food revolution has had little positive effect on farm livelihoods or food security. To arrest these trends, Jerry Buckland calls for farm policies founded on farmer-led food security and a democratization of the global institutions that have had such detrimental effects on the world's farmers.