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Banking is for Others: Contradictions of Microfinance in the Ghanaian Market

Journal of World-Systems Research

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Title Banking is for Others: Contradictions of Microfinance in the Ghanaian Market
 
Creator Pang, Irene
 
Subject —
 
Description Recent literature on microfinance has observed that commercial microfinance programs that achieve financial sustainability largely fail to reach the poor (Hulme 2000; Mayoux 2000; Cull, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Morduch 2007). Most studies rely on institutional explanations for this failure (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Pache and Santos 2010; Canales 2011). Using a Braudelian conceptualization of a fragmented, three-tiered capitalist world-economy, this study examines how Ghanaian market women finance their businesses within the bottom layer of the capitalist world-economy, and why, despite the availability of commercial microfinance, they continue to rely on informal finance. I argue that commercial microfinance is structurally constrained by contradictions between the profit-driven logic of the upper layers of the capitalist world-economy and the socially-embedded and subsistence-driven logic that organizes the market in which market women operate. I also show that, to the extent that commercial microfinance partially penetrates the market, it disrupts the circulation of financial resources and weakens existing social and economic networks within the community.
 
Publisher University Library System, University of Pittsburgh
 
Contributor —
 
Date 2016-08-16
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
—
 
Format application/pdf
 
Identifier http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/640
10.5195/jwsr.2016.640
 
Source Journal of World-Systems Research; Vol 22, No 2 (2016): Special Issue: Coloniality of Power and Hegemonic Shifts in the World-System; 510-541
1076-156X
 
Language eng
 
Relation http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/640/834
 
Rights Copyright (c) 2016 Irene Pang
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0