EBRD Impact Briefs

This Brief reports RCT evidence from rural Morocco on how matching microcredit repayments to borrowers’ expected cash flows affects loan choices, business performance and repayment.

This Brief presents evidence on how tailored technical assistance and mentorship for high-potential startups in EBRD regions can support participating firms to improve funding, employment, and market reach outcomes.

This Brief explains how blended finance programmes can help women entrepreneurs to access (more) credit and therefore grow their businesses.

This Brief reports on recent EBRD research that estimates the impacts of investments to upgrade and improve municipal water infrastructure in the Kyrgyz Republic.

This Brief reports on the impact of access to finance, and related advisory services, on employment in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the EBRD regions.

This Brief reports on recent EBRD research that estimates the impact of major investments to upgrade roads across Turkey as well as roads and railways in the Western Balkans.

This Brief explores how private equity funds can help companies prosper. It documents a rich set of value-creation strategies followed by PE funds, which help boost investment, employment and sales and deliver returns to investors.

This Brief reports on a randomised lab experiment with a Turkish bank to detect gender discrimination among lending staff. Though gender bias was widespread among staff, this did not cause explicit discrimination in loan approvals. However, for women, loan approval was more likely to be made conditional on the presence of a guarantor.

Microcredit is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty, but recent research from across seven countries has shown that giving poor people access to microcredit does not lead to a substantial increase in household income. There also appear to be no significant benefits in terms of education or female empowerment. However, what microcredit does do is allow low-income households to better cope with risk and to enjoy greater flexibility in how they earn and spend money. In short, microcredit is a useful financial tool but not a powerful anti-poverty strategy.

A substantial part of the world’s population has no or only limited access to formal financial services. Many of the poor depend on informal networks and family ties – which are often less reliable or relatively expensive – and this may constrain potential entrepreneurs in executing profitable investment projects. To analyse to what extent a lack of credit may inhibit entrepreneurship and perpetuate poverty, this EBRD Impact Brief reports on a randomised field experiment in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Learning about the impact of microcredit is important because the microfinance industry itself is changing. Microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending to individual lending. Yet there is not much rigorous evidence showing how these types of microcredit affect borrowers, and this makes it difficult to either substantiate or challenge such a strategic move. This EBRD Impact Brief, prepared by the Office of the Chief Economist, assesses the impact of lending approaches and presents evidence from a recent randomised field experiment in Mongolia.