[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucg/wpaper/0039.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Microfinance and the Decline of Poverty: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands

Author

Listed:
  • Heidi Deneweth
  • Oscar Gelderblom
  • Joost Jonker
Abstract
Building on recent work by Collins et al. this paper aims to explain the failure of corporate and public initiatives to alleviate poverty before the twentieth century by unravelling the financial rationale behind the various combinations of private efforts, family and neighbourhood help, financial intermediation, and government intervention tried by poor households in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. There existed several financial institutions whose functioning was very similar to modern microfinance institutions, yet none of them were in a position to help the poor. We find that in the Netherlands the boundary of formal financial markets moved down not because of financial innovation, but because of economic growth pushing up wages. Until the last quarter of the 19th-century poor households simply lacked the money to use newly established mutual insurances, savings- and loan banks.

Suggested Citation

  • Heidi Deneweth & Oscar Gelderblom & Joost Jonker, 2013. "Microfinance and the Decline of Poverty: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands," Working Papers 0039, Utrecht University, Centre for Global Economic History.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucg:wpaper:0039
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/WorkingPapers/CGEH%20WP%20No39%20Deneweth%20et%20al%20.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    microfinance; poverty; cash flow management; 19th century; Netherlands;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucg:wpaper:0039. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Carmichael (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cgeuunl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.