The Political Economy of Microfinance ― Financialising Poverty

Our capitalism is a financialised capitalism, and microfinance its response to poverty. Microfinance has broad-ranging effects, reaching hundreds of millions of people, and generating substantial returns. The microfinance sector directly connects investors and billionaires with poor individuals and their families, in the name of poverty alleviation. Although systemic flaws have become obvious, most strikingly in the 2010 Indian crisis marked by overindebtedness, suicides and violence, the industry's global expansion continues unabated. This book helps understand the enigmatic microfinance sector by tracing its evolution and asking how it works as a financial system. As the author argues, microfinance heralds less the end of poverty than a more financialised form of poverty. While microfinance promises to empower, it generates discipline through a system of financial governmentality and extracts substantial resources from the poor, producing new crises and new forms of dispossession.

Philip Mader teaches Sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He has studied in Sussex, Cambridge, Cologne and Harvard. His doctoral thesis, written at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, won the German Thesis Award and the Max Planck Society's Otto Hahn Medal.