摘要：For poor rural families in developing countries, access to credit and savings facilities has the potential to make the difference between grinding poverty and an economically secure life. Well-managed savings facilities permit house-holds to build up funds for future investment or con-sumption. Credit enables them to tap finances beyond their own resources and to take advantage of profitable investment opportunities. Credit and savings also serve as insurance for the poor. In rural areas of developing countries, short-term loans or past savings are often used to provide basic necessities when household incomes decline temporarily—after a bad harvest or between agri-cultural seasons, for example. But in most developing countries, rural financial services are sadly inadequate. Those who want to borrow from the formal sector are usually deterred by the strict collateral requirements and high transaction costs in-volved in doing business with formal institutions. Many potential borrowers are in such need of credit that they are willing to pay substantially higher interest rates in the informal markets—sometimes as high as 80 percent per year. But the amount of credit available through informal markets is often constrained by bottlenecks in the local supply of funds.
