Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of microfinance on women-owned microenterprises’ (WMEs) performance in Indonesia. It especially observes how financial, human and social capital influences performance of enterprises.

Data were collected from a survey conducted in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, covering more than 100 WMEs. The ordered probit technique is applied to estimate the performance vis-à-vis financial, social and human capital relationships.

This study finds a negative relationship between performance and financial capital, and positive relationships between performance-human capital and performance-social capital. However, with respect to human capital, the level of education has a marginally significant relationship with performance.

Microcredit for the purposes of enhancing business performance might not necessarily be a good idea, if it is unable to generate higher returns. As a business develops, the volume of microcredit should be reduced, and replaced by owners’ own savings and retained profits. Regarding the non-financial factors, it might be useful for policy makers to contemplate providing incentives for spouse involvement in microenterprises run by women, and to consider them in designing credit policies. Group meetings activities should be extended to facilitate members to engage in business-related conversations and to develop social relationships. The ability of loan officers and group leaders to facilitate such conversations appears important.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first in-depth understanding of the role of microfinance programmes in the case of performance of WMEs in Indonesia, one of the world’s most populous economies.

The purpose of this paper is to address the small, women micro-entrepreneur dominated and heterogeneity limitations of the Atmadja et al. (2016) study. The sample is much larger, includes more men and is more heterogeneous, which allows deeper insights and more meaningful explanation of the relationship between microfinance and microenterprise performance in the case of Indonesia, including the effects of gender, lending scheme and money separation.

This study used a survey of 556 respondents across five microcredit providers in the city of Surabaya using an updated instrument. Ordered probit is used to analyse data.

Microfinance may not matter for microenterprise performance in the case of Indonesia. Additionally, microcredit schemes (individual vs group) and gender may also not matter for performance, but money separation might have some influence.

Non-financial factors such as human capital, spousal involvement, and money separation should be considered as important factors for improving microenterprise business performance in Indonesia, with less focus on microcredit per se.

This study provides further evidence that microfinance may not matter for microenterprise performance in the case of Indonesia, a populous middle income country with a very long history of microfinance.

A review of literature has documented that accessing formal credit and other banking services has always been a crucial challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The alternative, therefore, tends to be informal channels. However, the credit constraint vis-à-vis informal channel link does not appear to be well documented in the literature. This study aims to investigate whether credit constraints significantly affect the probability of accessing informal credit, as well as the credit values of Vietnamese SMEs.

This study uses a trinary approach and correlated random-effects Probit and Tobit techniques to avoid the incidental coefficients problem.

The results suggest that relative to unconstrained and partially constrained firms, fully constrained firms tend to be more active in the informal credit markets, shown by their higher probability of informal credit access and larger credit values.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on Vietnam that takes a different approach to credit constraints and examines their impact on informal credit access. Policy implications arise and are discussed.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2017-0543

The scope of this research is to investigate performing loan efficiency for fifty European banks during the period 2008–2017.

The study is structured as a two-stage analysis of performing loan efficiency and its driving factors. In the first stage of the proposed methodology “Data Envelopment Analysis” is used to estimate performing loan efficiency for each bank included in the sample. A bootstrap statistical procedure enhances the findings. In the second stage, the impact of other factors on the efficiency scores of loan performance using tobit regression is investigated.

The results are consistent with the findings of the individual banks' financial analyses. According to the findings of DEA implementation, the evaluated banks may enhance their cost efficiency by 39% on average. In addition, the results indicate that loan efficiency performance improves after 2015, coinciding with the business cycle's upward trend. The tobit regression is employed in the second stage to examine the influence of bank-related and macroeconomic factors on banks' loan management efficiency. According to the findings of the tobit regression, three factors, namely the capital adequacy ratio, GDP per capita and managerial inefficiency, have a substantial influence on performing loan efficiency.

This research investigates the effectiveness of European economic policy in protecting the European banking system from the consequences of the sovereign debt crisis in several euro area members. The results highlight the distance of the Eurozone from the level of the ‘optimal currency area’.