Phil Mader has just out one of the very best books examining the increasingly frail global microfinance industry. His thesis starts from the observation that the microfinance movement is a key part of financialised capitalism, and that, in the name of poverty alleviation, it increasingly serves to connect investors, large private banks and billionaires with poor individuals and their families languishing at the so-called 'bottom of the pyramid'. But while microfinance advocates argue that this emerging structure holds out the promise to empower the poor and ameliorate their poverty situation, Mader argues instead that its main attribute is actually that it allows the key players in the financial sector to extract substantial resources from the poor in a new form of socially-validated market-driven dispossession. Coming just as the microfinance model has been awkwardly revealed by mainstream economists as having had little to no positive impact (see recent work by Karlan, Banerjee and Roodman), Mader's book deserves, and should get, a wide readership for carefully explaining why so many individuals and institutions in the financial and international development sectors are desperate for the failed microfinance model to continue to dominate the global policy response to poverty.
Dr Philip Mader is a research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies, UK, and before that he taught in Basel and studied in Sussex, Cambridge, Cologne, and Harvard. His doctoral thesis completed in 2013, and upon which his book is based, was written at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and it won the German Thesis Award (and Euro 30,000) and the Max Planck Society's Otto Hahn Medal.
Contact Phil at mader.phil@googlemail.com
Mader, Philip (2015): The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financializing Poverty. London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
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Posted by: milford bateman <milfordbateman@yahoo.com>
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