2015년 9월 29일 화요일

[메모] 권력, 그리고 들뢰즈 인용문 한 구절


권력: 자기 뜻대로 일을 성사시키고, 자기 결정에 따라 상황을 통제하며, 제약에 구애되지 않는 능력.

cf.
노예나 피고에 관련된 무한한 초월성인 ‘권력 자체’는 존재하지 않는다. 권력은 ‘법’이 우리로 하여금 믿게 하고자 하는 것처럼 피라미드 적인 것이 아니라 선분적이고 선형적인 것이며, 높은 곳에서 멀리 떨어져 작동하는 게 아니라 인접성에 의해 작동한다.
출처: https://twitter.com/gdeleuze_bot/status/648666571146039296

※ 위 들뢰즈 인용문의 전후 맥락으로 어떤 텍스트가 흐르는지는 전혀 모르지만 이 짤막한 인용문을 읽으면서 드는 생각이랄까 느낌 같은 것을 어수선하게 적어 본다.
  • 노예제하의 노예나 국가 권력의 처분에 따라 처벌 받는 피고를 예로 들어, 그러한 개인에게 행사되는 권력이 무한하고 초월적인 '권력 자체'로 존재하는 것은 아니라는 이야기인 듯.
  • 권력은 입체적인(혹은 체계적인) 피라미드의 구조를 가진 것처럼 느껴지고, 법이 그러한 위계적인 입체(혹은 체계)의 모습을 구현하는 것처럼 보인다.
  • 그러나 권력은 그러한 위계적 입체(혹은 체계)가 아니라 선분적이고 선형적이다. 높은 곳에서 멀리 떨어져 작동하지 않으며 인접성에 의해 작동한다.

cf.
  • 어쩌면 이러한 언급이, 권력의 전복은 위계적 피라미드의 체계적인 전복에서 시작되기보다 그 선분과 선형성이 작용하는 인접성의 작용 역학을 구부러뜨리는 데서 시작될 수 있다는 의미일 것도 같다.
  • 어쩌면 권력을 작동시키는 시스템과 그 장치들이 상징을 통해 개인에 '내면화'될 때에도 그 개인의 내면화를 직접 유발하는 인접성의 역학이 실재한다는 뜻 같다. 
  • 예를 들어, 직접 실업을 경험함으로써 형성되는 어떤 내면화라든가, 친분이 있는 사람이 시스템에 적응하지 못해 자살하는 현상을 보면서 형성되는 내면화가 결코 높은 곳에서 상징을 통해 아무런 매개 없이 초월적으로 형성되는 게 아니라, 개인이 피부로 느끼는 직접적인 사태를 통해 형성된다는 이야기 같기도 하다. 쉽게 다가오지 않는 '선분적', '선형적', '인접성'이라는 표현이 지시하는 것이 그러한 의미일 것 같다.

2015년 9월 21일 월요일

[발췌: D. Collins et al's Portfolios of the Poor] 7. Better Portfolios


출처: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven, ^Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day^, Princeton University Press, 2009.
자료: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/book.asp; 구글도서; ...


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pdf p. 203/212 ~

* * *

Chapter 7

Better Portfolios


( ... ... ) Measures of well-being such as the UN’s Human Development Index track health and literacy as well as income, broadening the domain of poverty reduction. 

   Yet the financial diaries made us think afresh about poverty in terms of money─and, more specifically, money management. We saw that without access to basic forms of financial intermediation, poor households found their health emergencies triggered broader economic crises; ( ... ... )

   When incomes are small, tools to manage income well become vitally important. ( ... ... ) This is the fundamental tragedy of poverty as seen through a financial lens: the triple whammy of incomes that are both low and uncertain, within contexts where the financial opportunities to leverage and smooth income to fit expenditure are extremely limited.

   A focus on money management does not shut out more ambitious aspirations such as improving health, education, and farming practices. On the contrary, it can help to realize them. By getting the fundamentals right─by making it easier for poor people to get a grip on time and money so that income earned in the past and income anticipated in the future can be tapped in the amounts required at the time most needed─basic money management tools are the very foundation for aspirations of a broader nature. ( ... ... )


Striving for Universal Service  (p. 204/214)

   Financial services for poor people─that is, microfinance, as provision of these services has become known─is enjoying unprecedented growth. ( ... ... ) More and more providers are setting up shop in more and more countries around the world, some of them fired up by the vision of improving the lives of the poor, others lured by the prospects of profits, and many─the so-called double bottom line institutions─attracted by both. ( ... ... ) 

   The poor-owned portfolios that are revealed by the financial diaries suggest that the surge of interest in supplying financial services to poor people is likely to be matched by real, ongoing, and substantial demand. The diaries have shown that it is because of, not in spite of, their low and uncertain incomes that poor people are extremely active in financial intermediation, through whatever means are available to them.

   As providers get better at responding to this demand over the next decade or so, financial services will enter a race that was unimaginable before now─the race to become the first high-quality basic service available to the poor on a near-universal basis. ( ... ... ) Microfinance’s advantage in this race is that it can pursue the task of delivering reliable and affordable services to the poor independently of public resources. It can also operate with less dependence on political will once there is a suitable legal framework in place for microbanking, something that many governments are already offering.[n.6]
[n.6] [about microbanking] It is especially important that regulation enables the mobilization of savings. Where reliable microfinance institutions are not allowed to take savings, poor people are driven to riskier places to store their money. Governments must balance the risk of giving free reign to fraudulent savings collectors with the risk of depriving the poor of opportunities to save in an organized way. See Wright and Mutesasira 2001.

   ( ... ... ) In the previous chapter, we saw how Kapila Barua and Ramna used savings and loans offered by a microfinance provider to manage medical expenses as well as school costs; they were able to do so because the provider’s financial tools were reliable and convenient. As poor people are enabled, through better money-management, to back their demands for health, educational, and other services with more resources, they will exert more pressure for improvement.


Opportunities and Principles  (p. 206/215)

   ( ... ... ) We have traced out the thousands of small transactions made by poor households and delved into intimate questions about why they occurred. Example after example revealed that poor people do indeed manage their money. But they also showed that the portfolios which result from their efforts are often fragile and incomplete.

   What, then, are the most promising ways of improving the portfolios? By distilling the detail from our diaries we have identified three big opportunities that providers can seize, and we offer a set of principles that should help guide them as they do so.


Opportunities  (p. 207/216)

   ( ... ... )

   ( ... ... ) Taking he broadest view of their[poor-owned] portfolios, we distinguish three ke services that are greatly in demand but often inadequately provided. Offering solutions to these key services give microfinance providers three big opportunities:
  1. Helping poor households manage money on a day-to-day basis
  2. Helping poor households build savings over the long term
  3. Helping poor households borrow for all uses

In some places, providing insurance will also provide a big opportunity, but the diaries
remind us that from a household’s perspective what matters is being able to manage risk,
not being insured per se. As chapter 3 described, having a chunk of savings to fall back
on and being able to borrow when needed are often the most critical ways to manage risk.

Cash-Flow Management  (p. 208/217)

   ( ... ... ) The first of our three big opportunities, then, is to offer poor households access to a cash-flow management facility that combines convenience with capacity. It would provide the chance to make small-scale savings of any value at any time with the right to withdraw on demand; and at the same time it would offer loans of a modest value that can be taken quickly, on demand, at any time, and repaid in small (and, if necessary, irregular) installments.

Building Savings  (p. 209/218)

   ( ... ... ) Our second big opportunity, therefore, is to offer long-term contractual savings products. These mimic savings clubs by making it possible to save small sums on a regular basis, but add the opportunity of doing so safely over the long term. As chapter 6 has shown, an account of this kind that is already common in the villages of Bangladesh has met with resounding demand, ( ... ). But this revolution in long-term “microsaving” is only just starting, and is yet to begin in countries where legislation to allow reliable microbankers to mobilize savings is not yet in place. ( ... )

Loans for All Uses  (p. 209/218)

   ( ... ... ) Our third big opportunity, then, is lending for a wide range of uses. The basic mechanisms are already available, because the development of uncollateralized lending has been the single biggest and most widespread achievement of the microfinance movement.
  • But many microfinance providers still prefer their borrowers to use their loans for just one purpose─microenterprise. Where this is enforced, clients cannot borrow for other vital uses even when they have the cash flow to service the loans. 
  • ( ... ) many loans ostensibly taken for microenterprises are used for other purposes. It is time for microfinance not merely to face up to this reality, but to embrace the opportunity that it presents. 
  • By offering general-purpose loans, matched in value and structure to the cash flows of poor households, microfinance would open up to the biggest single market it is likely to find among the poor (especially the urban poor who tend to be waged rather than self-employed), and one that would be greatly appreciated by most of our diary households.

   Many of these loans will be used to deal with emergencies. ( ... ... ) If there were such a thing as “general purpose insurance”─an insurance policy that paid out for a wide range of events─poor households would be more likely to embrace it. In its absence, the next best way of dealing with risk is through savings, backed up by access to loans, as the stories in chapter 3 vividly show.


Principles  (p. 211/220)

   reliability, convenience, flexibility, and structure.

   ( ... ... ) Regularities─such as scheduled visits by bank workers, or planned savings or loan repayment schedules─that promote self-discipline are what we mean by structure.


The Supply-Side Challenge  (p. 214/223)

   ( ... ... ) Chapter 6: microfinance providers in Bangladesh that have brought convenient money-management accounts, structured savings, and more flexible loans to most of the nation’s poor households. ( ... ) Also in Bangladesh, SafeSave, offers its clients exceptionally high levels of convenience. Clients are visited every day at their home or workplace, and may take loans without fixed terms that can be paid down day-by-day as the client likes. Yet this service too is delivered profitably.

   ( ... ... )

Maximizing Money  (p. 215/224)


Appendix 1: The Story behind the Portfolios  (p. 217/226)

[발췌: D. Collins et al's Portfolios of the Poor] 6. Rethinking Microfinance: The Grameen II Diaries


출처: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven, ^Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day^, Princeton University Press, 2009.
자료: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/book.asp; 구글도서; ...


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pdf p. 179/188 ~

* * *

Chapter 6

RETHINKING THE MICROFINANCE: THE GRAMEEN II DIARIES


( ... ... ) But Grameen found itself in trouble in the late 1990s. Loans were no longer being repaid at the on-time rate of 98 percent that the bank had long advertised: in some areas it had fallen below 75 percent. In 1998 a devastating flood, one of the worst in the country’s history, damaged many millions of households and exacerbated Grameen’s problems by a further dramatic erosion of loan repayment. The bank had a crisis on its hands.

   It responded with a major rethink; old premises were discarded, new approaches ( ... ) were brought on board. In 2001─just after we completed our original Bangladesh diaries─Grameen’s management was ready to roll out a series of new and modified products, which it called “Grameen II.” The rollout proved successful ( ... ).  The process shows the possibilities for building on the perspectives that we’ve developed in the previous chapters.

   ( ... ... )

   To understand the developments from the point of view of the clients, we ran a special set of financial diaries in Bangladesh in 2002-2005. The diaries show that several of the insights generated by the original diaries and set out in the preceding chapters are─quite independently─being used to develop workable new products by Bangladeshi institutions as their understanding of the market improves. As there are now approximately 20 million microfinance customers in Bangladesh, this is no trivial development.


Organized Finance for the Poor  (p. 180/189)


Grameen II  (p. 182/191)


The Grameen II Diaries  (p. 185/194)


Managing Cash Flow with Passbook Savings  (p. 187/196)


Managing Cash Flow and Forming Large Sums with More Flexible Loans  (p. 189/198)


The Use of Microfinance Loans  (p. 192/201)


Accumulating Large Sums in Commitment Savings Accounts  (p. 195/204)


Grameen III?  (p. 199/208)

[발췌: D. Collins et al's Portfolios of the Poor] 5. The Price of Money


출처: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven, ^Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day^, Princeton University Press, 2009.
자료: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/book.asp; 구글도서; ...


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pdf p. 153/162 ~

* * *

Chapter 5

THE PRICE OF MONEY


In the spring of 2007, the Mexican microfinance bank Banco Compartamos completed a highly successful public offering of its stock. Inspired by Grameen Bank, Compartamos had grown rapidly while keeping its focus on a customer base of low-income women.
  • ( ... ... )
  • But for others the success story was marred by the high interest rates that Compartamos charged its customers. [:] on average, Compartamos’s interest rates exceeded 100 percent per year. Of that, customers paid 15 percentage points to value-added taxes, 24 percentage points went to profits, and the rest covered the basic costs of making loans.
   Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, was outraged. His concern aligns with the broadly felt sense that programs for the poor should not take advantage of customers’ vulnerability and lack of options.
  • Moneylenders may charge 100 percent per year or more, critics like Yunus argue, but microfinance institutions are not moneylenders. 
  • Yet Grameen Bank, like its competitors, does not give away its services for free. It aims to charge reasonable prices for reliable services. In South Asia, interest rates tend to vary between 20 and 40 percent per year, well below the rates charged by Compartamos but well above giveaway levels.
  • A study of nearly 350 microfinance institutions worldwide found that, after taking inflation into account, interest rates generally fall between 10 percent and 35 percent per year─again well below the interest rates of Compartamos.
   Still, the same study found that those institutions serving the poorest customers face the highest costs of lending. Finance for the poor means dealing with lots of small loans and, when savings services are on offer, many small deposits. For providers, smallsized transactions mean limited scale economies and thus high costs per transaction.
  • Out of necessity, “pro-poor” microfinance institutions tend to charge the highest interest rates of all; microfinance banks serving better-off customers tend to charge the least. 
  • Even if Compartamos had earned no profit and paid no taxes, their interest rates would have still had to be 60 percent per year to cover costs of their strategy for small-scale lending in Mexican villages and towns.
   Examples from the diaries confirm that interest rates on financial services for the poor can be very high. In South Africa, most moneylender rates run at about 30 percent per month
  • Even the Small Enterprise Foundation, a microfinance institution in South Africa with a long-term commitment to serving the rural poor in Limpopo Province, charges an effective interest rate of about 75 percent per year on its loans, but barely covers its costs after paying its staff and accounting for its own capital costs.
  • Interest rates this high sound usurious, perhaps, but borrowers report that local moneylenders, who charge much more, will only lend them much smaller amounts of money. 
  • If it were forced to charge much less, SEF would have to rely on donors to a greater extent, and it is far from clear whether donors would be willing to support SEF’s operation indefinitely.
   ( ... ... )

   The financial diaries provide new evidence on the prices paid by poor households, and the ways that households make choices about them.
  • In general, we find that households are willing to pay prices that are high when compared to those routinely paid by the better off.
  • ( ... ... )
   Part of the answer lies in the differences in the way that loans and savings are structured for the poor compared to the wealthy. ( ... ... )
  • As a result, some of our findings will sound surprising. For example, there are good reasons why poor people pay to save, even though richer households typically expect banks to pay them interest on deposits.
  • We also find moneylenders demanding high interest rates but then settling, ultimately, for a different price, often lower but sometimes higher than their stated rate.
  • Moreover, chapter 2 showed that households are as likely to pay no interest at all for loans (usually offered by relatives and neighbors) as they are to pay annualized interest rates equivalent to 100 percent and more to the local loan shark.
  • Nothing about this or other research suggests that poor households are insensitive to price, but then nothing suggests that price is the overriding concern when they seek financial services.[n.4]
   ( ... ... ) On balance, our findings tend to support the view that legislation restricting interest rates would be counterproductive for pro-poor providers. Price caps would undermine the work of institutions like SEF that fill gaps and open opportunities for households with limited financial options.


Pricing’s Complex Origins  (p. 156/165)

   ( ... ... )

   The cost of financial services is important for the poor, too, but it is more difficult to understand how these services are priced. Modern rich-country providers have made huge strides in reducing “transaction costs”─the costs of using an instrument other than the financial cost of the funds used. But transaction costs for poor people usually
remain high.
  • They may include the time taken to stand in a long queue, the emotional cost of having to deal with unhelpful, stone-faced tellers, the cost of the bus ride to reach the bank, or the sheer number of lenders who must be persuaded to part with their money before a usefully large sum can be amassed.
  • In the case of some informal transactions, there may be obligations to the lender other than repaying the loan along with interest─to work for some days at a low wage, for example.
  • Price, then, can only take the limelight when multiple other conditions are met, not just large numbers of suppliers in competition, but an operating environment that assumes basic infrastructure, public goods, and a market in which customers “shop” equally.
   Among the hundreds of loans recorded in the financial diaries, there are many that appear to have been taken for similar uses but at widely differing nominal interest rates, maturities, and default/rescheduling rates. Similar heterogeneity characterizes savings and insurance contracts. Digesting this data suggests several insights that help us to understand pricing of financial services for the poor.
  • An immediate insight is that interest rates may often be better understood as fees for a service than as a rate for the use of money for a specific period.
  • Bankers typically express interest rates in annual terms ( ... ). The APR helps customers compare prices against the same yardstick.
  • ( ... ) but the diaries also show that converting a flat fee on a one-week loan for a small amount of money to an APR, and then comparing it to the APR for a two-year business capital loan, misses the essence of the transaction, as we show in detail in the next section.
  • A second set of insights is that prices adjust to many factors: to personal relationships, ( ... ... ) how often loans are rescheduled or forgiven, and how quickly they are repaid, ( ... ... ).

Fees versus Interest Rates  (p. 158/167)
   ( ... ... )

   Using concepts like NPV is central to first-world savings and lending, since every day that your current investment does not pay you interest, an alternative investment might have. Attention then focuses not only on the interest you earn each day, but also on the interest earned on that interest─the compounding of interest earnings. ( ... ... )

   However in the financial environment of the poor, money and time are not so closely associated. Interest is rarely compounded; sometimes it remains the same flat fee until you repay the loan, even if you’ve paid back some of the principal. For example, in South Africa, the typical interest rate on loans from moneylenders is 30 percent per month, which would translate into an effective APR of 2,230 percent on the full balance, due to interest paid on interest as a result of compounding.[n.6] But such a calculation fails to take into account two common features.
  • First, South African moneylenders rarely use compound interest. This makes their interest rates easier to understand and calculate. It can also favor borrowers who pay slowly. A customer who failed to pay anything toward his loan would owe interest of only 30 percent of the principal alone, not 30 percent of the principal plus outstanding interest.
  • Second and conversely, the moneylenders don’t adjust interest to take into account early repayment, in full or in part. This means that customers paying early or on time pay higher rates than those paying late. In “rich-world” banking, late payers are penalized since they incur costs in additional interest. But for many poor borrowers, it may be more accurate to treat financial returns and costs as flat fees rather than rates that accumulate fees over time.
   Seeing interest rates as a fee rather than an interest rate goes some way to helping us understand why households are sometimes happy to pay what we might consider to be astronomically high interest rates. We saw that in some examples given in the first chapter:
  • a poor person may sensibly pay 50 cents to borrow $10 for a day or so to tide her over a problem, even if the annualized rate calculates to more than 500 percent. The absolute outlay is just not that great, even if the percentage rate is astronomical. ( ... ... )

Stated Prices versus Actual Prices  (p. 160/169)

Pricing for Profit─or to Minimize Exposure?  (p. 164/173)

   It is important to remember that moneylenders are often as much part of the community as their clients, which makes forgiveness and rescheduling even more likely. Moneylenders who feature in the South African diaries are often simply better-off people in the neighborhood. In Bangladesh also, there are very few professional moneylenders who lend for a livelihood. Most so-called mahajans, the Bengali word most often translated as “moneylender," are simply “big persons," wealthier people who lend as much out of obligation as out of profit-motivation; ( ... ... )

   ( ... ... ) In the Bangladesh and Indian diaries, interest stated at the outset was paid in full in less than half of all the private interest-bearing loans reported. In a third or more of all loans, the interest was discounted, forgotten, forgiven, or ignored, and in the remaining cases the position over interest remains unclear. ( ... ... )

   It is difficult to predict when negotiation on a troubled loan will work and when it won’t. Ronakul is a very poor older man in our Bangladesh sample, whose sevenmember
household lives off irregular earnings of about $68 per month ( ... ... various episodes of loans and repayment ... ... )

   Discounting or forgiving, on the evidence from our study, depends on the relationship between borrower and lender. ( ... ... )

   So for sizable loans with longer terms, it is common to see a high stated cost that is later negotiated down. From a lender’s point of view, this has two benefits. 
  • First, it acts as a deterrent─if I state a high price, maybe the would-be borrower (whom I know to be poor and likely to have difficulties repaying) won't take the loan, or will take less.
  • Second, it assures me that I will get some early return on the loan: if I manage to get 10 percent a month for the first three months but then earn nothing more, my overall rate for the term of the loan as a whole may still be positive. 
  • Many microfinance institutions charge up-front fees on their loans for similar─and good─reasons. It is an obvious way of reducing risk.

Microfinance Lending  (p. 167/176)

   Within this environment, how have the microcredit institutions adapted? In Bangladesh, where they collect loan interest along with repayments at weekly intervals, they and the formal banks are the only providers that earn interest on a consistent basis.
  • Following Grameen, most microlenders in Bangladesh and many others worldwide charge interest on a “flat” rate, in which principal and interest payments are included in weekly installments of a fixed unvarying size.
  • 선진국의 모기지 상환 방식과의 대비.
  • ( ... ... )

From the Saver’s Point of View  (p. 169/178 - 178/186)

   ( ... 약 10쪽의 꽤 많은 공간을 할애하여 저축자의 행동과 숫자 계산 사례 ... )

[발췌: D. Collins et al's Portfolios of the Poor] 4. Building Blocks: Creating Usefully Large Sums


출처: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven, ^Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day^, Princeton University Press, 2009.
자료: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/book.asp; 구글도서; ...


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pdf p. 150-152/159-161

* * * 

Chapter 4

BUILDING USEFULLY LARGE SUM


( ... ... )

Conclusions  (p. 150/159)

Like richer households, poorer households need to finance the big things in life. For this, they need big chunks of money. Putting together large sums is, not surprisingly, far harder for the poor. How do they do it?

   The first answer is that they do so piecemeal. Large sums are cobbled together from smaller ones: loans are taken, gifts received, savings depleted. Financial tools capable of producing really big sums─simply and in a single place─are rarely there.

   But this isn’t a pessimistic story. The second answer is that households use financial instruments to trap and hold the small amounts they can squeeze out of a monthly budget. The poor households whose lives we followed did have room in their budgets to set aside funds for saving or repaying loans, and most used that capacity during the research year. Although balance sheets don’t show many large-scale items, our households did form several usefully large sums each year─sums that were multiples
of an average month’s income.

   The instruments that helped them leverage their capacity to save into these larger sums were of two kinds. 
  • There were the “accumulators” that allowed them to save regularly at fast rates, and the “accelerators” that encouraged them to pay down large loans quickly. The accumulators were mostly, though not exclusively, in the informal sector, and consisted of several kinds of savings clubs. The accelerators were found in the informal, semiformal (microfinance), and to a lesser extent, the formal sectors. 
  • The underlying mechanism was the same in the two kinds of instrument. Both help poor households maximize their budgeting capacity by exchanging usefully large sums for a series of small regular payments. In this way, the act of saving and borrowing often looks quite similar in practice (except, of course, borrowers get hold of their sum sooner). In both cases, the sums can be used for any purpose. Microloans, for example, are by no means always used fo─nor repaid from─microenterprise profits.
  • ( ... ... )
   Existing financial devices, then, have many positive features. But this doesn’t mean that the poor should be left to make do with these instruments only. Accumulators and accelerators are not always available or reliable. They are not always able to offer schedules that match household cash flows or to be available for sudden emergencies. And their terms are often too short, hindering long-term accumulation.

   By building on the established financial habits of poor households, providers interested in serving the poor can begin devising instruments that offer improved, longerterm versions of accumulating and accelerating devices. Chapters 6 and 7 describe ways that this creation of new instruments is already happening.

[발췌: D. Collins et al's Portfolios of the Poor] 3. Dealing with Risk


출처: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven, ^Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day^, Princeton University Press, 2009.
자료: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/book.asp; 구글도서; ...


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pdf p. 76/85~

* * *

Chapter 3

DEALING WITH RISK


In 1974, Jaleela and her baby fell seriously ill with dysentery. Jaleela, one of our Bangladeshi respondents, recalled the acute difficulty she then faced. The family had no savings to speak of, and her husband was unable to raise loans quickly enough to pay for treatment. He resorted to mortgaging her marriage jewelry to a pawnbroker. Happily, mother and child survived, though the jewelry was lost. Years later, her husband, a rickshaw driver, fell ill and couldn’t work, and the family went hungry for three days until a neighbor supplied them with food. Then in 1992, Jaleela again fell seriously ill. She used a microfinance loan for treatment, but that wasn’t enough: she had to draw down all her savings before she was cured.
  • To be poor in Bangladesh, India, or South Africa is to live not only with the difficulties of managing life on a day-to-day basis, but, like Jaleela’s family, to live with the risk of large-scale disruption to lives and livelihoods. ( ... ... )
  • In the previous chapter, we saw how the diary households went about stretching small, awkwardly timed incomes to ensure that they were able to put food on the table every day and fulfill other needs that arose. To achieve these basic objectives, they were driven to frequent small-scale intermediation, resulting in portfolios characterized by turnovers that were large relative to incomes, and which passed through many different kinds of financial instruments, most of them informal. The diaries revealed poor households to be active money managers, in search of flexible and reliable financial tools suited to their cash flows.
   The financial diaries are also full of tales about the anxiety that comes from anticipating emergencies and dealing with them when they occur. Risk is omnipresent, despite the overall economic and political stability in the three countries we study. This chapter looks at the financial impact of these risks.
  • We show how poor households cope, and describe the financial tools and strategies they have developed to shelter themselves. 
  • Self-help, of course, is no substitute for access to public safety nets and commercially based insurance. 
  • Neither typically exists in sufficient quality or quantity in poor communities, however, and we show how the diary households seize the tools at hand. Those tools offer protections that are too often fragile and incomplete, and we describe the improvements that can come from better access to insurance and, importantly, flexible ways to save and borrow.

   ( ... ... ) All the same, much “insurance” was obtained through the same informal relationships with neighbors and relatives that, as we saw in the previous chapter, are used to deal with day-to-day money management needs.
  • ( ... ... )
  • The portfolio approach offers a further perspective. It shows how households work to meet their needs by patching together sums of money from different sources. Single solutions are rarely comprehensive, but they don’t need to be so in order to be useful. While desirable in principle, comprehensive solutions can be complicated and expensive, raising the risk that they may never get off the ground or be sustainable. The portfolio approach shows the power of well thought-out partial solutions. Nowhere is this clearer than in examples of how South African households patch together resources for funerals.


Living with Risk  (p. 78/87)

   ( ... ... )

   During the research year, a total of 167 financial emergencies were experienced by our diary households. Table 3.1 shows the most frequently occurring kinds of emergencies for the three countries. Serious injury and illness, as well as death itself, predominate, followed by major losses to income and property.

   ( ... ... )

Getting Protection  (p. 81/90)

   ( ... ... )

   Our diary households are not alone among poor people in being inadequately protected by insurance. Although many national surveys don’t even ask about insurance, those that do ask find that few respondents have it. One study reports that fewer than 6 percent of the extremely poor in a wide range of countries are covered by health insurance, for example.

   Family and neighbors play important roles in the absence of such formal insurance arrangements, and economists have started to quantify the degree to which the informal mechanisms fill in gaps. One line of research focuses on “village insurance,” where households in the same village “insure” each other against household-level shocks. In the diaries, we do find many cases of neighbors helping each other out, not only with cash-flow management, as we saw in the last chapter, but also in risk management, as we’ll see in this one.
  • Much of that help is given in the form of reciprocal gifts or flexible loans between relatives. But less often do we see an entire community combining resources to help one particular family in need. Many households do participate in informal financial groups, like savings clubs. Rarely, however, are these groups based on the notion of the whole village coming together to help out those of its members who get into trouble─they are, rather, based on a structure of self-insurance
  • Even in an example of informal insurance groups that we’ll introduce in this chapter, the burial societies of South Africa, membership is not given automatically to everyone in the village. Each household has to contribute payments, and payouts are rulebound and contingent on the amount paid in. This is not the “risk sharing” embedded in the concept of “village insurance.” 
  • Households actively seek ways to individually self-manage their own risks through a variety of financial instruments, including reaching out to relatives. This suggests, as does the literature on village insurance, that simply relying on one’s neighbors to help you out in an emergency is not enough─households (and extended kin networks) must and do try to self-insure.
   Some of our diary households were investing in financial tools specifically designed to protect against emergencies. The tools fall into a small number of distinct categories: life insurance in India, life insurance and credit-life insurance in Bangladesh, and funeral coverage in South Africa. Each offers lessons for creating better financial tools.


India: State-Sponsored Insurance for the Poor  (p. 92/91)

Bangladesh: “Pro-poor” Private Life Insurers and Credit-Life Coverage  (p. 85/94)

South Africa: Funeral Coverage  (p. 88/97)

Patching from Here and There  (p. 95/104)

   So far we have looked at the take-up of specialist instruments that are available to some of our diary households for dealing with risk: life and some other forms of insurance in India, life endowments and credit-life coverage in Bangladesh, and funeral coverage in South Africa. We turn now to what happens when an emergency actually occurs. ( ... ... )


Health Problems Are Financial Problems  (p. 99/108)

Two Sides of Moral Hazard  (p. 101/110)

Toward Better Tools  (p. 104/113)

   ( ... ... ) But the fact that the South African burial schemes stood out as unusual suggests that the difficulties of arranging insurance is one of the main weaknesses of the informal sector. To work, informal insurance schemes need to bind users together in associations that endure over long periods of time, a task that gets ever harder as populations become more mobile and occupations individualized.

   ( ... ... )

   Insurers need help reaching the poorer and more remote groups. One solution is to form partnerships between formal insurance companies (who have the know-how in the sophisticated areas of actuarial analysis and investment) and microfinance institutions (who have the outreach to large numbers of poor households). Such partnerships are already under way around the world. India, for example, had 35 micro health insurance schemes running in 2006, under this partner-agent model, with nearly 900,000 policyholders.

   ( ... ... )

2015년 9월 20일 일요일

[발췌: D. Collins et al's Portfolios of the Poor] 2. The Daily Grind


출처: Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford & Orlanda Ruthven, ^Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day^, Princeton University Press, 2009.
자료: http://www.portfoliosofthepoor.com/book.asp; 구글도서; ...


OF WHICH

※ 발췌 (excerpts): pdf p. 34~

* * *

Chapter 2 

THE DAILY GRIND


Subir was 37 when we met him, and his wife Mumtaz only 29, though their oldest son Iqbal was by then at least 14. They had come to Dhaka, Bangladesh, when Iqbal was a baby, soon after their scrap of land in central Bangladesh was washed away by the great Ganges River. They had three more children, all sons, and Mumtaz was pregnant again and delivered her fifth son midway through the research year (“No more!” she told us). Day by day, Subir and Mumtaz focused on managing life on a dollar a day per head─and sometimes less.

Their strategies, and those of other diarists, are the subject of this chapter. We will see how their money management responds to the challenges of living on income that is both low and uncertain, and how doing so determines much of their financial lives.

   ( ... ... )

   Our opening chapter asserted that is not just the ^low value^, but the ^uncertain timing^ of their incomes that makes money management so important for poor households, and so it was for Subir and Mumataz.
  • Institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank usually focus on explaining why incomes, totaled over the year, are so low, and what can be done to raise them. But the unpredictable ups and downs of income are also an important part of what it is to be poor, and they cause many of the specific challenges faced by the households we came to know.
   ( ... ... )

   Making these uncertain income flows deliver a stable home life was a constant preoccupation for Subir and Mumtaz. Most of the time they succeeded. They never had to beg, but they did skip meals, and the quality of their food varied. ( ... ) Usually, though, they ate twice, and in really bad times just once a day. But at least they ate something every day, and it is a tribute to their resourcefulness that they managed that. 

   Subir and Mumtaz and their family survived thanks in part to financial tools. The most intensively used tools, however, were not those celebrated by advocates of microfinance for the poor. In the year we spent with them, Subir and Mumtaz did not, for example, seek a “microcredit” loan to fund the expansion of a small business. True, Subir could have earned more if he owned his own rickshaw rather than renting, and a loan would have hastened the purchase. But, as we show below, he had good reasons not to do so. ( ... ... )
  • Instead households like that of Subir and Mumtaz borrowed and saved mostly to meet pressing short-term needs: their main objective was cash-flow management. Being able to manage immediate needs is a precondition for considering long-term ambitions─but the way that poor people achieve it has received scant attention from policymakers and others arguing for financial access for the poor.
   ( ... ... ) As we argued in chapter 1, the poor households we met actively employ financial tools not ^despite^ being poor but ^because^ they are poor. When it came to managing money, Subir and Mumtaz put a premium on the flexibility and convenience of their financial tools, even though those tools were not always reliable. Their juggling reminds us that money is fungible─it can be split and combined in a number of ways. We argue in the concluding section that embracing this flexibility of money can open vistas for financial providers looking for better ways to serve poor households.

   Diary households in both the urban and rural areas of all three countries employ
strategies and have portfolios that, no matter how they vary in detail, are similar in
important ways.
  • Most important, they are characterized by frequent small-scale transactions. Both saving and borrowing are involved, often with multiple partners and using several different kinds of instruments simultaneously. The result is portfolios with large flows of cash: large relative to the level of outstanding debt or of savings held at any one time. ( ... ... )
  • Asset building is an important objective of poor people’s portfolios, and chapter 4 discusses this process further, but in this chapter we suggest that understanding the financial lives of poor households starts with a focus on cash flows rather than balance sheets.
   ( ... ... )


Small Balances, Large Cash Flows  (p. 38/47)

Though the households we worked with included some that were very poor, none lived
hand to mouth, if we take that phrase to mean that all income is consumed directly and
immediately. ( ... )
  • But the finding remains hidden if we look only at asset accumulation. Not surprisingly, the diary households have relatively few financial assets. Year-end asset values tend to be small: a median value of $68 in Bangladesh, $115 in India, and $472 in South Africa. Even adjusting for differences in purchasing power in different countries, these assets are not large, and might lead us to assume that they could sustain little financial activity.
  • But what we learned is that data on balances told us little about what happened during the year. The financial diaries were designed specifically to lift the veil on a wide array of financial activities that take place day to day and week to week.
   The story is revealed when we look at cash flows rather than balance sheets. During the year, all of the financial diary households pushed and pulled through financial instruments amounts far greater than their year-end net worth.
  • By “push” we mean deposit, lend, or repay. By “pull” we mean withdraw, borrow, or accept deposits. ( ... )
  • We use the expression “turnover” to mean the total sum of money being “pushed” into instruments plus the money being “pulled” out of them.
  • Table 2.1 shows the households’ high turnover in financial instruments. As we describe later, most of the activity runs through informal devices, below the radar screen of regulators and bankers
   The high level of financial cash flow is particularly surprising when considered inrelation to income. We might call this ratio the “cash flow intensity of income”: the sum of funds borrowed, paid out, recovered, deposited and withdrawn, divided by income of all sorts.
  • In India, households shifted, on average, between 0.75 and 1.75 times their incomes, with high-velocity money movers like rural small traders shifting more than three times their earnings in an average month. In South Africa, the monthly turnover in cash flows was slightly more intense, at about 1.85 times the monthly income.
   In general we found that the flows moving through financial instruments are large relative to income even in households with low incomes and small balances.
  • In Bangladesh, where rural incomes are lower than urban ones, median turnover in the countryside is nevertheless higher than in the town. In South Africa, the poorer half of the households turned over a bigger multiple of their income than the richer half. ( ... ... )
  • The lowest annual turnover of the entire financial diaries sample was $133, more that 3/4 o income. Most households have turnover in excess of $1,000 over the year, and many have much higher.
  • This attests to our general notion that lower incomes require more rather than less active financial management.
   ( ... ... )


Multiple and Uncertain Occupations …  (p. 41/50)

Understanding the reasons for high turnovers is the starting point for understanding the
financial lives of these households. ( ... ... )


… and Low Incomes  (p. 44/53)

( ... ... )

Unpredictability  (p. 45/54)

The first element of the triple whammy that poor households face, then, is low incomes. The second element, the uncertain timing of cash flows, is well brought out by the diary methodology.

   ( ... ... )

   p. /57  ( ... ... ) During May, she and a group of three other sheep intestine sellers formed a savings club, a financial device we’ll talk more about in chapter 4. From Monday to Thursday, each paid in $7.50 a day, and they took turns getting the entire pot of $30. That way they evened out cash flow to help tide them through the lean days.
  • the savings club fell apart. 
  • a temporary government-sponsored job cleaning streets for four weeks while her daughter kept the sheep intestine business running. 
  • another savings club with three other coworkers in this job. ( ... ... )

   Another case of a car driver in Dhaka: ( ... ... )

   Case of South African households survive primarily on the basis of the government grants:
  • The grants arrive monthly, with no payouts in between. They are regular and relatively predictable, but arrive at intervals that are too long for some recipients and too short for others. 
  • Those who find the monthly interval too long may pair with another recipient or join a group of recipients to share the grants as they come in. ( ... )

Does a Formal Sector Job Bring Security?  (p. 49/58)

( ... ) similar insecurities exist in formal labor. A case from Delhi provides an illustration.  
  • ( ... ... ) The brothers worked in the finishing sections of export garment factories and received wages at daily or piece rates. As peripheral workers hired by a broker, they faced excessive work at some times and no work at others. They got work through “emergency orders” rather than as core workers in the factory. Variations in their workload were reflected in their income flows.
  • Their combined monthly wage fluctuated between $85 and $53 and stopped completely for four months in the middle of the research year. For two of these months they were in their village, but it took them two months to find work after they came back to Indira Camp. ( ... )
  • Before they left Delhi, the brothers had managed, between them, to remit an average of $26 per month to their village, but after returning to Delhi they sent nothing, and this neglect made them very anxious. They had also borrowed money, first to get home, then to cover their stay, and then to get back to Delhi, a debt of over $100, most of it with interest. Only by the goodwill of their landlord and a grocery store manager, both acknowledging their good payment record in the past, were the brothers able to sustain themselves into a fifth month, when work finally came their way. By that time they had accumulated debts of $120. Somnath paid a bribe of $4 to get his job back, but only three months later, lost it again. When he received his final salary, Somnath managed a small remittance of $11 to his wife and child, the first since he had left Delhi for the village seven months earlier.
  • ( ... ... )
   ( ... ) In South Africa, however, labor laws are much more rigorously enforced, and when households do manage to find a waged job, they tend to have a fairly reliable source of income. Even grant recipient households could depend on regular monthly grant income.
  • In our study, these households were able to “leverage” their more regular sources of income to engage in larger-scale financial intermediation: with a regular income, they were more comfortable taking on higher levels of debt and lenders were more willing to provide loans.
  • ( ... ... )
   Like a small start-up business, a poor household may indicate financial health by carrying a certain level of debt. A start-up business needs to take on debt in order to invest and grow. Likewise, poor households need to access debt so they can weather interruptions that may threaten their investments in the long term. Accessing debt can prevent a family from lowering its nutritional intake or pulling children from school in an
emergency

   ( ... ... ) However, much of the high debt situations in the South African financial diaries developed through borrowing outside of the formal financial sector, beyond the scope of regulatory policy.
  • Many grant recipients did not increase debt through formal lenders, who would require a payslip, but through informal debt at a local store or with a local trader. Moreover, in many instances debt did not arise from reckless consumption, but from stretching too small an income over too many mouths to feed, a matter of meeting basic needs between payments.
  • ( ... ... )

Partners in Money Management  (p. 52/62)

In the portfolios of our diary households, common patterns emerge. One is that most transactions are carried out with “informal” partners rather than with formal institutions like banks and insurance companies. The partners are often neighbors, who seldom keep documentation of agreements, and certainly nothing that would hold up in court.
       This doesn’t mean that poor households are simply at the mercy of grasping moneylenders. Far from it: the most frequent partners are friends or relatives offering interest-free loans. Turning back to the financial portfolio of Subir and Mumtaz, we note a number of kinds of loans in table 2.2.
    • Subir, an affable man with lots of charm, managed to borrow often and without owing interest. In just two months─November and December 1999─he borrowed five times, all from neighbors and colleagues, and Mumtaz borrowed once, from her sister. The sums were tiny: none of them exceeded four dollars, and all were quickly paid back from rickshaw income.
    • Small as they are, interestfree loans like these, which featured in many of our diaries, did the job they were intended to do─they ensured that the household members ate something each day. They constitute one of the two core elements of managing money for everyday survival, and as such they deserve more of our attention when we are thinking about how to improve financial services for the poor.
       The other core element is small-scale savings. Every household we met made some attempt to save.
    • All the older members of Subir and Mumtaz’s household, for example, saved at home in some way: Mumtaz in a locked box in a drawer in the cupboard, Subir in a cloth bag tied into the roof timbers, and son Iqbal ( ... ... )
    • Often they had small savings at home even as they took loans, and this behavior offers us another insight. [:] Poor households less often choose between alternative instruments (say, loans and saving) than they maximize access to both in a world where nothing fits perfectly and access is constrained.
    • Spending money is patched together from various sources─a bit from savings, another bit from a moneylender loan, another from an interest-free loan, and so forth.
       The tools used for informal saving and borrowing are generally close at hand (savings hidden in the hut, loans from nearby neighbors) and flexible (that is, without strictly fixed terms or payment schedules), two hallmarks of desirable cash management tools.
    • Convenience has also been taken to heart by the microfinance providers operating in our Bangladesh study areas.
    • When we first met them, Subir and Mumtaz told us that they had decided not to join a microfinance institution (an “NGO” to them) because their main need was to save, not borrow. If they borrowed, they might not be able to make the regular weekly repayments.
    • But then they heard about an NGO where borrowing wasn’t compulsory, and joined it, at first just to save. They used the savings account primarily to patch gaps in their cash flow, saving small sums when they could, and drawing down the balance when they needed to for food, travel costs, medicine, and the like. This account provided them with useful liquidity in times of need: they withdrew sums of $10, $5, and $4.60.
       When, later in the year, they grew comfortable with Mumtaz’s NGO, they began to borrow from it. They might have put their NGO loan toward the purchase of a rickshaw for Subir ( ... ). Such microlending to support microenterprise or self-employment has been a leading premise of the microcredit movement. But the couple decided that buying a rickshaw was too risky because they had nowhere safe to park it at night.
    • Instead, they used the loan to (1) stock up with rice, (2) bought a wooden cupboard (their only piece of furniture apart from an old bedstead), and (3) lent $20 to a fellow rickshaw driver at a nominal 17.5 percent interest per month, a loan that was repaid three months later with about half the interest honored and the rest forgiven.
    • In short, they used the funds mainly for basic consumption needs for themselves and others
    • The couple’s behavior with their NGO loan should make us think carefully before we conclude that loans for poor people are of little value, or may even be a dangerous temptation to fall into deep debt, unless they are used for working assets.
    • Rightly or wrongly, Subir and Mumtaz believed that there were other constraints, besides the lack of capital, to their buying a productive asset─in this case the risk of loss. They may have been too timid, but they also saw other good uses for the loan: a stock of food, a piece of furniture, and the chance to strengthen a financial relationship with a colleague and make some money at the same time.
       Against the backdrop of small-scale do-it-yourself saving and frequent interestfree borrowing, the couple engaged in a wide range of other deals to bridge gaps between income and expenses. They took goods on credit from two grocery shops and a restaurant. ( ... ... )

       Through vigilance and energy, Subir and Mumtaz managed to keep their family fed. The process was never easy and required tools that were flexible and easy to access.
    • The informal sector has proved to be the best provider of those tools so far, and the challenge for the formal sector is whether it can do better, with services that are just as flexible and convenient, but also more reliable and more liquid.
    • It might be tempting to learn “tools of the trade” by watching the local moneylender, but as the next section describes, the most important providers of loans are not moneylenders but friends and neighbors.

    Small-Scale Lending and Borrowing  (p. 56/65)


    To manage day to day, the diary households patched and stretched their savings and their loans, a strategy that was called into play whenever an employer failed to pay on time, a spell of unemployment hit, or a visitor suddenly arrived, to name just a handful of
    reasons.
    • Perhaps because saving is something that an individual or a household can do without involving others, virtually every diary household saved. In Bangladesh, for example, not a single one of the 42 households, even the very poorest, was without some form of do-it-yourself saving.
    • And yet for none of these households was saving-at-home a sufficient strategy: all of them had to turn to others in their community to bolster their capacity to manage their money. So while saving was the most ubiquitous instrument, much more cash flowed through loans. ( ... )
       Overwhelmingly, the loans were taken locally, in the “informal market." 
    • In Bangladesh, 88 percent of all borrowing deals were informal, a figure that climbs to 92 percent for the poorest part of the sample.
    • In India, 94 percent of all borrowing was informal, which, again, climbs to 97 percent among the poorest respondents. Of all respondents in the poorest category in India, only one household had borrowed from anything but an informal source, and that was from a microfinance institution.
    • But the term informal “market” is misleading here, because in all three countries most of these loans were interest-free. ( ... ... )
       After home savings, interest-free borrowing was by far the most frequently used financial instrument in all three countries. It complements rather than contrasts with the households’ attempts to save at home, because interest-free borrowing and lending is in
    essence a way of harnessing the savings power of a neighborhood or family network to address the cash-flow problems of its individual members.
    • ( ... )
    • Better-off people might manage money on an everyday basis with a credit card. For the poor households in our study, the main strategy was to turn to each other, using one-on-one lending and borrowing between friends, family, and neighbors.
    • 대부분의 융자는 며칠, 몇 주, 한두 달 내에 상환.
      These interest-free borrowings and lendings were ubiquitous among the households in all three samples. ( ... ... )

       Interest-free borrowing and interest-free lending relate to each other in interesting ways. [:] "reciprocal" lending or borrowing vs. "obligatory" lending. ( ... ... )

       To smooth their consumption, then, poor people often lean on those around them with marginally more resources, and this is true not only in purely cash transactions, but also in groceries taken on credit, in rent payments delayed, and in advances taken against wages. All these transactions have in common that the advance (whether in goods, services, or payment for labor) is given within an existing relationship that reduces the risk to both borrower and lender.

       Interest-free transactions between households in the informal network are not confined to borrowing and lending. In all three countries, there is a well-established tradition of “moneyguarding”─storing cash for others seeking a safe haven for savings or for cash that needs to be kept aside for some later purpose. ( ... ... )


    The Full Triple Whammy  (p. 60/69)

    ( ... ... )


    Conclusions  (p. 70/79)

    ( ... ... )

       Having more assets would certainly help the households in our study, adding a cushion in difficult times and creating resources for major investments. ( ... ... ) But we should beware of looking through only the asset-building lens when planning improvements in financial services for the poor: the diaries show that the challenges and
    priorities of the households are, in many ways, more fundamental.

       Even when financial growth is low or absent year on year, just having access to basic financial services can have a fundamental impact, one that may be as important as asset-building.
    • This is because when incomes are low, financial strategies need to focus in large part on coping with the irregularity and unpredictability of income in order to get food on the table and address other basics. 
    • If that focus is not in place, hunger and other forms of deprivation loom, and the household can slip quickly into destitution.
    • The diaries reveal what one-off surveys tend to miss: poor-household incomes are not merely low but awkwardly timed, and the financial services used to address this irregularity in incomes are imperfect. This chapter has been devoted to the consequences of this triple whammy.
       Not surprisingly, poor households put a great deal of effort into “cash-flow management”<m->making sure that money’s on hand when needed to meet basic expenses.
    • In the rich world, a household’s portfolio of financial instruments is usually managed on the basis of risk and return. 
    • The portfolios of poor households are instead managed to ensure that money can be obtained in the desired amounts at the desired times. Money is scarce and its supply erratic, so dealing with cash flow is usually more urgent than calculating the best mix of return and risk.
    • If wealthy households can indulge in a slow and steady style of financial management not unlike that of an established company, poor households tend to look more like start-up companies, judiciously allocating cash on hand and constantly looking out for new funds.
    Cash-flow analysis, rather than balance-sheet analysis, is the way to begin understanding their financial lives. These financial efforts, though, would have been hidden had we only looked at the accumulation of household assets from one year to the next. Year-opening and year-end balances may scarcely differ, but in the months between all manner of financial tools are used intensively.

       Richer people manage their basic cash flow using a wide range of reliable devices: credit cards, debit cards, checks, automatic teller machines, and the like. But even they can run into cash-flow problems, so it is not surprising that poor households, who lack the luxury of such services, have to work even harder to manage their money.
    • Patching cash-flow mismatches between income and expenditure is ideally done through saving and dissaving, but, because appropriate vehicles are hard to find, poor households more often turn to small-scale borrowing and lending with friends, relatives, neighbors, and employers.
    • It is often hard work, and it can carry high costs─some of which are social and psychological and not just economic.
    • For poor households, then, having alternative sources of reliable, convenient, reasonably priced financial tools would make a big difference. In this context, it is notable, and even surprising, that helping them with cash-flow management has received limited attention in microfinance strategies.
       In recent years, business experts have made the case that the world’s poor constitute an enormous and largely untapped market for goods and services, a next frontier for retail business. Marketers eye billions of dollars' worth of soaps, radios, mobile phones, and financial services to be sold to customers like our diary households if only retailers can develop the right products and marketing strategies.
    • If you take the view that the poor constitute a viable market─that there is a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” as C. K. Prahalad has put it─product development starts with a recognition of households’ financial ups and downs.
    • Seeing that the poor could not afford many of their existing products, multinationals like Proctor and Gamble and Unilever found a solution by selling single-serve packets of shampoo to poor households in India. The single-serve packages, costing a few cents each, turned out to be a popular option for people lacking the daily cash flow to easily purchase large bottles of shampoo, regular-sized tins of tea, 200-count bottles of aspirin, and the like.
    • The innovation did not reside in the nature of the products. There is nothing special about the shampoo itself. Rather, it came from discovering a way to suit payments to patterns of household cash flows. The insight arose from understanding the financial lives of the poor and responding effectively to their needs.
       What features are needed for a mass market in tools for cash-flow management for the poor? Our priority list would start with basic reliability and flexibility:
    • services that are rule-bound, transparent, and simple to understand. Loans that are disbursed on the date promised, in the amount agreed upon, and at a standard price. Savings accounts that allow ready access and convenient withdrawals, with deposits and withdrawals made in any value. Insurance contracts that pay out quickly and with little haggling when needs arise.
    • These qualities are demanded (and often taken for granted) by the world’s richer households, but they are no less important for the world’s poor.
       The diaries show that informal financial mechanisms tend to be quite flexible, but not always reliable. Microfinance services, on the other hand, tend to be reliable, but not always flexible. One element of inflexibility in microfinance is the insistence by some lenders that all loans be invested in businesses. They do so partly because they believe that an important part of their mission is to foster economic development through business growth, and partly because they fear that loans cannot be repaid without revenue from business.
    • The diaries show, however, that poor households need to borrow for a wide range of needs, not just business, and that they are prepared to find ways of repaying loans from ordinary household cash flow. For the diary households, today’s reality is that so-called business loans are already being used for many nonbusiness purposes, as chapter 6 will show.
    • Embracing the notion that households seek loans for general purposes will open up possibilities for innovation and expansion for microfinance providers.
       There are other simple ways to make loans more flexible. 
    • One idea common in informal lending (and sometimes in microfinance lending) is allowing penalty-free grace periods when cash-flow problems hit. 
    • Another idea, introduced by Grameen Bank in the past few years, is to allow borrowers to “top up” their loans (by borrowing again what they have repaid) part way through the repayment schedule, to increase liquidity. We return to this example in chapter 6. 
    • Another important path is the development of loans with a range of terms, including short-term “emergency loans.”
       Yet another innovation is to offer loans secured against liquid assets commonly held by the poor, since the security allows for more flexibility in repayment schedules. 
    • Here, the experience of India’s banks is again instructive. Indian banks have fulfilled their obligation to lend to “priority sectors” (the poor) mainly by lending to jointly liable groups of poor customers (building on the pioneering work of the Grameen Bank).
    • But the banks are also lending against deposits and gold, to individuals, at rates slightly higher than to joint liability groups but on more flexible terms. A 2003 study of five rural banks showed that such loans, while small in terms of dollars disbursed, account for 25-35 percent of all accounts. ( ... ... )
    • ( ... ... )
       These features─small frequent payments, flexible schedules, and loans against small-scale physical and financial assets─are the ones we highlight for the specific task discussed in this chapter: managing money on a day-to-day basis. We do not dwell here on features important for the other key money-management tasks we have identified<m->risk management and building lump sums: these will be discussed in the next two chapters.

    2015년 9월 17일 목요일

    [자료: G. Tily's] John Maynard Keynes and the Development of National Accounts in Britain, 1895-1941


    출처: Geoff Tily, “John Maynard Keynes and the Development of National Accounts in Britain, 1895-1941,”^Review of Income and Wealth^,
    Series 55, Number 2, June 2009.

    자료: http://www.roiw.org/2009/2009-14.pdf; http://econpapers.repec.org/article/blarevinw/v_3a55_3ay_3a2009_3ai_3a2_3ap_3a331-359.htm; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-8847.2009.00322.x/abstract; ...



    [발췌: A. Smith's WoN] On the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour

    출처: Adam Smith (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations.
    세부 출처: Chapter 3, "On the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour," in Book II, "On the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock."

    자료: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book02/ch03.htm (My catalog of Adam Smith's writings)

    ※ 발췌(excerpt):

    * * *

    Book II: On the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock 

    Chapter III: On the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour


    There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. 
    • Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he, in reality, costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed. 
    • But the maintenance of a menial servant never is restored. 
    A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.
    • The labour of the latter, however, has its value, and deserves its reward as well as that of the former. 
    • But the labour of the manufacturer fixes and realizes itself in some particular subject or vendible commodity, which lasts for some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion. That subject, or what is the same thing, the price of that subject, can afterwards, if necessary, put into motion a quantity of labour equal to that which had originally produced it. 
    • The labour of the menial servant, on the contrary, does not fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be produced.

       The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does fix or realize itself in any permanent subject; or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured. The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unprouctive labourers. They are the servants of the public and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. Their service, how honourable, how useful, or how necessary soever, produce nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. The protection, security, and defence of the commonwealth, the effect of their labour this year will not purchase its protection, security, and defence for the year to come. In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc. The labour of the meanest of these has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour; and that of the noblest and most useful, 50 produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour. Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production.  


       Both productive and unproductive labourers, and those who do not labour at all, are all equally maintained by the annual produce of the land and labour of the country. This produce, how great soever, can never be infinite, but must have certain limits. According, therefore, as a smaller or greater proportion of it is in an one year employed in maintaining unproductive hands, themore in the one case and the less in the other will remain for the productive, and the next year's produce will be greater or smaller accordingly; the whole annual produce, if we except the spontaneous productions of the earth, being the effect of productive labour.


       Though the whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country is, no doubt, ultimately destined for supplying the consumption of its inhabitants, and for procuring a revenue to them, yet when it first comes either from the ground, or from the hands of the productive labourers, it naturally divides itself into two parts. One of them, and frequently the largest, is, in the first place, destined for replacing a capital, or for renewing the provisions, materials, and finished work, which had been withdrawn from a capital; the other for constituting a revenue either to the owner of this capital, as the profit of his stock, or to some other person, as the rent of his land. Thus, of the produce of land, one part replaces the capital of the farmer; the other pays his profit and the rent of the landlord; and thus constitutes a revenue both to the owner of this capital, as the profits of his stock; and to some other person, as the the rent of his land. Of the produce of a great manufactory, in the same manner, one part, and that always the largest, replaces the capital of the undertaker of the work; the other pays his profit, and thus constitutes a revenue to the owner of this capital.


       ( ... ... )





    2015년 9월 16일 수요일

    [발췌: Mitra-Kahn's Redefining the Economy] 5. Political fragmentation breaks empirical economics, 1740-1780


    출처: Benjamin H. Mitra-Kahn, “Redefining the Economy: how the ‘economy’ was invented in 1620, and has been redefined ever since,” Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London. September 2011.

    자료: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1276/


    Chapter 5_ Political fragmentation breaks empirical economics, 1740-1780
    5.1 Political fragmentation changes the economic debate
        5.1.1 Matthew Decker's apparent conversion
        5.1.2 Decker and Political impact
    5.2 The contribution of professionals
        5.2.1 The anonymous professional of 1746
        5.2.2 Andrew Hooke and Newton's ratios
        5.2.3 Hooke's economy
        5.2.4 Arthur Young, the last of the practical economists
    5.3 Scholars vs. industrial policy advisors
        5.3.1 What sort of an economy could emerge from this?
    5.4 The end of an 18th century of empirical advice

    * * *

    OF WHICH

    ※ 발췌 (excerpts):

    The second half of the 18th century is portrayed by Schabas (2005) and others as a time when economics and the economy as a concept emerge on a wave of secularism following the dark ages of mercantilism. Just as I have argued that there was no dark age but a deep and exciting empirical literature from 1700 to 1750, I illustrate how there was no sudden emergence of the concept of an economy in the late 18th century. Indeed I show that there was an economic debate from 1740 to 1780 and its focus was on the definition and measurement of the economy. I argue that the economics Schabas (2005) and Hoppit (2006) see as emerging toward the 1770s is actually the emergence of a more familiar authorship on economics. They note the familiar scholary authors who discuss economics, but mis the forgotten traditional policy advisors, who were writing and calculating throughout the century. These merchants, industrialists and other non-scholars were trying to maintain their policy influence, and this is why the industrialist Andrew Hooke was so keen to point out that merchants addressed the "common life" while academic Doctors of Divinity offered nothing but "airy speculations."

    ( ... ... )


    5.2 The contribution of professionals

    ( ... ) As I continue to argue in this section, there was no shortage of economic and empirical writing during this period. Numerous empirical submissions were made to parliament and the public from 1740 to 1780, and the authors were industrialists and professionals who did not want to be left alone: they wanted to affect policy. I present the national accounts of three authors in order to give a picture of the economic discourse during this period. I believe that these accounts, in addition to the work of Massie and Decker, giver a clear indication that the period was empirically interesting and rigorous by the standards of the time. I dwell on the work of the industrialist Andrew Hooke[n.7] (1750) who adopted part of Newton's physics to make his empirical argument. This episode leaves a question mark by Schabas's (2005) notion that there was an adoption of better methods and secularisation of economics only after 1776, because Hooke takes the latest maths and applies it free of any religious consideration. ( ... ) these authors were not full time scholars but professionals and businessmen who wanted to analyse the nation and provide policy advice, just as they had for the last century.


    5.2.1 The anonymous professional of 1746

    ( ... ) Published anonymously, the author argued that the current tax system was "a Custom begun in bad times, supported by bad Men, and founded upon bad Principles" (Anon. 1747: 87).

    This was not just a letter but a tract submitted by a professional author, perhaps a lawyer or an MP. I refer to the author as a 'professional' as there are numerous references to parliamentary debate and documents in the submission (Anon. 1746: 10). ( ... ) His focus was on the "Trade and interest of his country" (Anonymous 1746: 3) and the national income was defined quite specifically:
    What I mean by National Incomes is, all the whole body of our people get or receive from Land, Trade, Arts, Manufactures, Labour, or any other way whatsoever; and by Annual Expence I mean, the whole that they spend or consume; and I lay it down as a Rule certain, that if our Annual Income is equal to our Annual Expence, we need never borrow. (Anon. 1746: 28-29)
    The national income is the total income received by the "whole body of our People" from land, trade, and any type of labour. The difference between the national income and expenditure makes up both the taxes and the investments made by people and the government, or superlucration (Anon. 1746: 23). From that initial definition, the author provides a very detailed national income account, with a proposal for a new tax system, where income is taxed at 10% with lower rates for low income families.

    The national income account imputed a rent for owner-occupied housing and set out the economy in terms of wages from all professions including "Painters, Poets, Virtuoso's, Mathematicians" and so forth (Anon. 1746: 34). The national income of England adds up to £65.6m, and Scotland added £8m. The author argued that the current tax system was unfair and inefficient because the land tax reached a third of the nation's income (similar to Davenant's 1698 claim) and was levied on less than a third of the population. The annual income column was calculated to address the more pressing concern: "I hope it is not yet too late to examine our Strength, and see how much an equal Taxation may fairly raise within the Year" (Anon. 1746: 8). The author proposes an income tax of 10% on all incomes, with lower taxes for low income manufacturers and labourers (£20-£40 p.a.) and exceptions for the poor and middle-income workers with more than three children (Anon. 1746: 39). This system would raise £8.7m if imposed nationally, and would be more efficient than current system. To re-assure the reader that this is affordable, he also provides a national expenditure account, divided by nations, including all taxes in the expenditure. 

    The economy was one where tax revenues competed with superlucration for the difference between national income and expenditure. It appears to include the foreign trade, though the incomes of 'Owners, Officers, and Traders at Sea', as well as the service industries, and is reminiscent in its logic of British Merchant (1713-21) or Davenant (1695, 1698), who had also opposed a land tax on exactly the reason that it only reached a third of the population (1695: 122). While the impact of this submission seems to have been minimal in terms of legislative change, it should be considered on its own merit as a piece of economic analysis. It is empirically clear, and sets out a definition of the economy reminiscent of past attempts, although with a modification on how national stocks could be accumulated. ( ... )

    Table 5.1 

    Table 5.2


    5.2.2 Andrew Hooke and Newton's ratios

    ( ... ... )

    [자료: Frits Bos's] Uses of National Accounts: History, International Standardization and Applications in the Netherlands


    출처: Frits Bos, “Uses of National Accounts: History, International Standardization and Applications in the Netherlands,” MPRA Paper no. 9387, 30 June 2008.
    자료: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/9387/ (Direct PDF)

    ... ...


    [자료: Mitra-Kahn's] Redefining the Economy: how the 'economy' was invented in 1620...

    출처: Benjamin H. Mitra-Kahn, “Redefining the Economy: how the ‘economy’ was invented in 1620, and has been redefined ever since,” Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London. September 2011.

    자료: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1276/ (Direct PDF)

    Main Contents of the Thesis:

    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1_ The Emergence of a space for the economy, 1600-1623   (15)
    • Chapter 2_ What mercantilism? Mun vs. Political Arithmetick, 1620-1700  (45)
    • Chapter 3_ The real 'golden age' of empirics and political arithmetick, 1695-1720   (70)
    • Chapter 4_ The credit driven economy of Defor and Walpole, 1720-1742   (97)
    • Chapter 5_ Political fragmentation breaks empirical economics, 1740-1780   (121)
    • Chapter 6_ A French Alternative to Physiocracy, 1750-1789   (153)
    • Chapter 7_ Adam Smith's economy in the long 19th century, 1770-1930   (182)
    • Chapter 8_ Keynes convinces Britain to re-define the economy, 1930-1945   (210)
    • Chapter 9_ How British GNP conquered the USA, 1920-1950   (236)
    • Chapter 10_ The on-going reinvention of the economy: a conclusion   (274)



    ※ 발췌 (excerpts) : ABSTRACT & INTRODUCTION

    ABSTRACT:
    Gross domestic product has long been criticized as a poor indicator of economic growth. In this thesis I argue that any proposed alternative for GDP cannot effect change, because GDP is not an indicator. Instead GDP is our definition of the economy, which I argue by presenting the history of how we have measured the economy through national accounts. GDP, it turns out, is simply the most recent consensus definition of what the economy is. So this is the history of how we have defined, measured and redefined the economy since its invention in the 1620s.
    Using primary sources I argue that the supposedly mercantilst definition of the economy was never policy relevant in the 17th century. The 18th century saw an active empirical debate and the economy was defined by Davenant's civil service, Walpole's Treasury accounts, and eventually scholars, who displaced secular policy advisors in the 1770s. Adam Smith defined an economy that dominated Britain for a century, but he adopted Physiocratic ideas which were rejected by the French government's own economists.
    British government offices continued to do empirical work in the 19th century and produced the 'official' statistics used for policy making. Marshall and then Keynes would use these offices to redefine the economy. Keynes convinced Meade, Stone and HM Treasury to redefine the economy and his idea displaced the official American definition, despite loud protestations from Kuznets. So this is a history which tries to challenge our view of the economy, by showing how we have redefined it in the past and indicates how we could do it again.

    INTRODUCTION: 
    ( ... ) GDP is simply the most recent consensus definition of the economy in a long history of definitions against which policy makers evaluate their impact and economists frame their theories.
    I make my argument using history to show that Britain, France and the USA have redefined their economy, and definition of growth, several times over the last 400 years. As it turns out, our definition of the economy tends to change every 50 to 70 years and, because the available history of economics has not focussed on this issue, past definitions and frameworks have been forgotten. This is highlighted in chapter 9 where I argue that the US government avoided armaments investment in 1940 because their official definition of the economy excluded government expenditure. 
    ( ... ... )