[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

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Chapter 4

BUILDING USEFULLY LARGE SUM

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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.
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   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.