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According to the author, rather than alleviating poverty, microfinance financialises poverty. By indebting poor people in the Global South, it drives financial expansion and opens new lands of opportunity for the crisis-ridden global capital markets. This book raises fundamental concerns about this widely-celebrated tool for social development.
List of contents
1. A Framework for Engaging Microfinance
2. A Genealogy of Microfinance
3. The Financialisation of Poverty
4. Financialising Public Goods
5. Mechanisms of a Microfinance Crisis
6. At the Crossroads of Development and Finance
7. Appendix
7.1 Calculating the Surplus Extraction
7.2 Projects Using Microfinance for Water and Sanitation
Report
'Microfinance is financialization dressed up as charity: a pathway for global finance to penetrate the capitalist periphery. In this richly documented book, Mader dispels the myth that debt can move the poor out of poverty. Far from an economics of liberation, microfinance is part of a politics of repression: it extracts more wealth than it creates, and reinforces economic dependence.' - Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Professor, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany
