Lifting You up or Dragging You Down? The Role of Financial Inclusion in Poverty Transitions Among Italian Households

We estimate the effect of financial inclusion on transition probabilities into/out of poverty. By exploiting a longitudinal sample of Italian households between 2002 and 2016, we find that financial inclusion is effective in both reducing the likelihood of entering poverty and helping the poor to climb out of it. According to our estimates, access to deposit accounts reduces the risk of falling below the poverty line by 2.7 percentage points (pp) and increases the chance of exiting poverty by 4.4 pp. Significance and magnitude of such effects are confirmed when considering different poverty thresholds and definitions, alternative proxies for financial inclusion as well as alternative empirical strategies.     

从贫困到社会排斥：理论演进与政策构想

从贫困到社会排斥,体现着社会的进步和发展。任何一个现代化的国家,均不会轻易承认贫困问题的存在。贫困的概念逐渐被另一个词语社会排斥所代替,同时也赋予了广泛的内涵,已经成为福利国家新的思维方式。社会排斥的过程是动态的。是一个历史的过程。社会排斥不仅仅是单位和个体的因素,既有的政策失败及不足也很容易产生排挤。社会排斥的原因外源上来自于全球化带来的进步与贫困,内因则是福利国家的失灵和社会的变迁,新古典经济理论和泛市场化基本教义也产生了重要影响。在此基础上提出了反社会排斥的政策构想,政府应实施积极地干预,在经济上积极实施就业政策,政治上保障公民权利,以及动员社区和地方参与都有利于抗衡社会排斥所带来的不利影响。     

Kenneth Boulding: Economics from a Different Perspective

The article calls attention to gender as a dimension of the expansion of U. S. consumer borrowing. The first section emphasizes that gender is not a dummy variable, but an evolution of habits of thought. The second section discusses how changing gender relations are connected to gendered product differentiation and market expansion. The final section connects gendered market expansion and changing gender habits of thought to the expansion of consumer borrowing. We argue that, in addition to the acknowledged role of credit, gender relations also mask the structural financial fragility of households.     

金融危机背景下中国消费信贷政策探讨

2007年美国爆发的次贷危机最终导致了全球性的金融危机,其根源在于美国社会的过度负债消费。受金融危机的影响,中国出口受阻、产能过剩凸显,为防止经济下滑,政府出台了扩大内需的政策,而追加投资在一定程度上又加剧了产能过剩,不利于经济结构的调整和长远发展,因此应大力促进居民消费,其有效方式是发展消费信贷。消费信贷促成了美国社会的高消费,曾极大地拉动美国经济增长,但过度负债最终拖累了美国经济。因此,中国应该吸取美国的经验和教训,结合中国的国情,合理发展消费信贷,鼓励和提倡适度负债。     

Competing Perspectives on the Liberalization of China’s Foreign Trade and Investment Regime

Using an institutionalist reading of the capability approach, I advocate policies for enhancing financial capabilities via financial inclusion. There are 34 million unbanked and underbanked households in the USA (with 68 million adults), many of whom rely on alternative financial services providers (AFSPs). Rather than castigate AFSPs for the predatory practices of some in the industry, this paper argues that a regulated industry can be integral to meeting needs of lower-to-moderate income communities. A typology of existing financial services in the USA is the basis for presenting these proposals. The policies I evaluate concern the economy's structures and institutions rather than focusing on an individual's or a household's financial literacy.     

美国信用消费法律制度及其对中国的启示

美国作为世界上信用消费制度最发达的国家之一,其信用消费立法一直备受关注。2009年的《金融改革方案》虽然确立了消费者保护的目标,但也给经济发展带来了更大的不确定性。在信用消费立法联邦化的趋势下,州立法实施更为严格的消费者保护标准受到联邦优先权的重压,也从实质上削弱了对金融消费者的保护力度。中国应当借鉴美国信用消费制度,确立政府的监管目标和价值取向,以国家立法和地方立法相结合作为主要立法模式,完善信息披露制度并建立完备的信用评估体系,设立专门的信用消费者保护机构,以更好地维护消费者权益。     

Funding self-employment – the role of consumer credit

This article investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – in particular, instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and nonfinancial household variables, we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. When analysing the correlation between consumer loan take-ups and consumption of self-employed in comparison to employee households, we find first evidence that overdrafts are used by self-employed to finance their business as well. This indicates that intermingling constitutes a financing strategy when regular business loans might not be accessible.     

Firm size,credit scoring accuracy and banks’ production of soft information

Research on SME bank financing generally assumes that smaller firms are more opaque from a lender’s perspective. We propose that the discriminatory power of credit scoring models can be thought of as a proxy for firm opaqueness, given that when these models perform poorly, lenders must invest in the production of ‘soft information’ to supplement the financial data used in these models. Measuring the discriminatory power of probit default models across quintiles of the Irish SME size distribution, we show that our proxy for firm opaqueness increases monotonically as firms get smaller. This finding supports an assumption that is the starting point to a wide strand of literature on SME bank financing. Our findings can also be interpreted as providing an insight to the literature on the determinants of banks’ choice of lending technology. While smaller banks may, as found in a substantial previous literature, produce larger amounts of ‘soft information’ due to their organizational advantages, they may also do so out of necessity: hard-information-based default modelling is less effective among smaller firms, thereby forcing banks that lend to these borrowers to invest more in relationship banking technologies to retain competitiveness.     

The Confidence Trap: Japan’s Past Bubble and China’s Recent Bubble

This paper explores the origin of China’s recent credit and asset boom by comparing it with the Japanese bubble economy in the late 1980s by focusing on the asymmetric pattern of financial liberalisation under high savings. It argues that (1) both cases show a ‘confidence trap’ in that policy-makers of the government shared a complacent mindset that they can achieve the optimal mix of market liberalisation and repression, while believing that their political economic system is fundamentally different from others; (2) Such complacent confidence precipitated the supply-side driven financial reforms, in which both governments tried to diversify the credit channels of bank deposits by promoting non-bank financial intermediaries; (3) Exogenous shocks played a pivotal role in enforcing the government to take aggressive monetary easing and fiscal expansionary measures. But the Chinese case is different from the Japanese case in that (1) local politics has promoted a ‘too secure to fail’ situation in which rent-seeking activities are difficult to be detected, thus aggravating the hidden systemic risks; (2) China needs to liberalise its capital account with the more strengthened macroprudential regulatory governance, as the global foreign exchange markets have drastically changed from the period of the 1980s.     

金融危机对巴塞尔新资本协议和商业银行风险管理的挑战

正在影响着世界的金融危机,在考验商业银行自身的风险管理能力的同时,也挑战了全球银行业赖以为标准的巴塞尔新资本协议。本文旨在从危机爆发的原因出发,封新资本协议关于银行的风险管理方面的规定进行分析,以及在金融全球化的大环境下,中国的银行业应该如何应对危机。     

The economics of New Labour: policy and performance

This paper reviews the foundations of New Labour's economicpolicies and the performance of the economy since 1997. It arguesthat New Labour's policies have evolved from Thatcherism andthat it has largely embraced the tenets of neo-liberalism. NewLabour has rejected most aspects of Keynesianism and its policieshave eschewed the use of active demand management policies.But it has been the high levels of demand—in particularconsumption expenditure—that have driven economic growthin the UK and which have ensured that (as yet) New Labour hasnot faced the problems of dealing with a major economic downturn.     

Institutional Analysis of Banks and Personal Loan Companies: Lesson from Poland

Abstract:

The purpose of the article is to explain changes in the behavior of individuals, their actions, choices and ways of thinking that took place under the influence of banking and personal loan companies in Poland. The hypothesis adopted here is that mistakes made in the lawmaking process in Poland caused a number of adverse social changes, which affected the poorest part of society. The article is devoted to legal norms which banks started to apply as prudential regulations after the financial crisis from 2008 to 2015. In 2016, new important legal regulations were introduced which slightly changed the image of the market described in the article. The article describes the results of the author’s research concerning far-reaching social consequences of the regulations introduced at that time. Such consequences include people already in the lowest-income levels of society falling further into poverty, as well as loss of trust in the state as an institution failing to protect all of its citizens.