1,721,094 research outputs found
Can flexible agricultural microfinance loans limit the repayment risk of low diversified farmers?
No full textFarmers’ preference for digital credit: Does the delivery channel matter?
No full textOpen-Access-Publikationsfonds 202
Farmers' willingness to pay for digital and conventional credit: Insight from a discrete choice experiment in Madagascar
No full textIn recent decades, microfinance institutions with financial products designed for low income groups have been established all over the world. However, credit access for farmers in developing countries remains low. Digital financial services are rapidly expanding globally at the moment. They also bear great potential to address the credit needs of farmers in remote rural areas. Beyond mobile money services, digital credit is successively offered and also discussed in literature. Compared to conventional credit which is granted based on a thorough assessment of the loan applicant's financial situation, digital credit is granted based on an automated analysis of the existing data of the loan applicant. Despite the potential of digital credit for serving the credit needs of rural farmers, empirical research on farmers' willingness to pay for digital credit is non-existent. We employ a discrete choice experiment to compare farmers' willingness to pay for digital and conventional credit. We apply loan attributes which reflect typical characteristics of both credit products. Our results indicate a higher willingness to pay for digital credit compared to conventional credit. Furthermore, we find that the proximity to withdraw borrowed money has a higher effect on farmers' willingness to pay for digital credit compared to conventional credit. Furthermore, our results show that instalment repayment condition reduces farmers' willingness to pay for digital credit whilst increasing their willingness to pay for conventional credit. Additionally, we find that longer loan duration has a higher effect on farmers' willingness to pay for digital credit compared to conventional credit whereas higher additional credit cost has a lower effect on farmers' willingness to pay for conventional credit compared to digital credit. Our results highlight the potential of digital credit for agricultural finance in rural areas of Madagascar if a certain level of innovation is applied in designing digital credit products.Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 202
Explaining weather-related credit risk with evapotranspiration and precipitation indices
No full text
Purpose
Although the microfinance sector in developing countries has seen an impressive development in recent years, many small-scale farmers in rural areas are still undersupplied with capital. One of the main reasons for this undercapitalization is the exposure to weather risks. Weather index insurance is assumed to bear high potential for accelerating agricultural lending. The index design hereby is of particular importance. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the influence of evapotranspiration and precipitation indices on the credit risk of farmers in Madagascar.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors base the analysis on a unique borrower data set provided by a commercial microfinance institution in Madagascar and weather data provided by CelsiusPro. In this context, evapotranspiration and precipitation indices both at aggregated bank level and at branch level are identified and their influence on credit risk of small-scale rice farmers is estimated.
Findings
The results show that the weather-related part of the credit risk of farmers can be better explained by an evapotranspiration then by a precipitation index. The precipitation index underestimates the weather influence on credit risk especially during the harvesting season. The results suggest a potential for weather index insurance which is based on an evapotranspiration index. The results are of similar importance for developed and developing countries.
Practical implications
The results suggest that, should insurance be considered as an appropriate risk management instrument for the farmers or the bank, weather index insurance has the potential to mitigate a certain part of the credit risk. The authors also find that the focus on precipitation-based index insurance products would underestimate the weather influence on credit risk. Furthermore, the results suggest that insurance products should be tailored to branches to be most effective.
Originality/value
To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that compares the explanatory values of evapotranspiration and precipitation indices in general and for the credit risk of small-scale farmers in particular.
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Farmers' awareness of digital credit: Does financial literacy matter?
No full textThis study investigates the relationship between financial literacy and farmers' awareness of digital credit in rural Madagascar. We apply questions that demonstrate individuals' understanding of the four fundamental concepts for financial decision making: numeracy, interest compounding, inflation and risk diversification to measure farmers' financial literacy. We find that financial literacy has a positive and statistically significant effect on farmers' awareness of digital credit. Our study highlights the importance of financial literacy for increasing farmers' awareness of digital credit in rural areas of Madagascar and supports the widely held view that financial literacy is crucial for individuals' awareness of financial products
Industry-government collaboration : Queensland's IT&T Strategy and the Information Industries Board
Full text linkThis paper presents a field study of the Queensland Information Technology and Telecommunications Industry Strategy (QITIS), and of the Information Industries Board (IIB), a joint industry-state government body established in 1992 to oversee the implementation of that strategy for the development of the IT&T Industry in Queensland.\ud
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The aim of the study was to analyse differing stakeholder perspectives on the strategy and on its implementation by the IIB.\ud
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The study forms part of a longer-term review which aims to develop methodologies for the selection of appropriate strategies for the IT&T Industry, and for the evaluation of outcomes of strategy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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