We produce blogs to discuss new research findings, ongoing projects, and even personal reflections on the research process. Our blogs are written for a variety of audiences, including other researchers, policymakers, practitioners, financial service providers, grassroots organizations, impact investors and the public. The format is simple and easy to grasp. The language is straightforward, and the tone is non-academic. Our blogs can be of varying lengths. We choose to write a blog when we don’t want to do a full- fledged study or follow a rigorous research process. Blogs may contain opinions and they can also be based on experiences. Some of our blogs may just share some observations, learnings, or challenges.
Continuing our series of posts on Consumer Protection, this post studies an important South African legislation aimed at consumer protection and also looks at the overall landscape for consumer recourse in the South African Financial Services sector.
Continuing our series of posts on Consumer Protection, this post looks at the approaches to financial regulation and supervision and studies the financial regulatory structure of South Africa.
Subsequent to our earlier post in the Consumer Protection series, this post covers conduct and disclosure obligations of Australian Financial Services (AFS) License holders for provision of advice to retail clients.
Every day, billions of low-income households all over the world are saving, borrowing and insuring in myriad ways, formal and informal.
Continuing on our series on ‘Consumer Protection’, we will take a look at how consumer protection has found its place within the regulatory architecture of select countries, namely Australia and South Africa.
A recent report titled “Latest findings from Randomized Evaluations of microfinance” by Jonathan Bauchet, Cristoball Marshall, Laura Starita, Jeanette Thomas and Anna Yalouris, throws a lot of interesting insights into the realm of randomized evaluations and how they are being increasingly used by researchers across the globe to better understand financial services for the poor and the impacts achieved when an appropriate financial intervention is introduced.
In the current edition of Economic & Political Weekly, Anand Sahasranaman of IFMR Finance Foundation has published a paper on Panchayat Finances based on an analysis of three villages - Pallavapuram, Pandiyapuram and Cholapuram in rural Tamil Nadu
Here are our picks: 1. De-regulation of savings account interest rates
India is rapidly urbanizing and the rate of urbanization is expected to climb steeply over the next few decades. The urban population of India will be close to 600 million by 2030, as compared to 340 million in 2008.
In the second blog in the Consumer Financial Protection series, we explore insights from behavioral economics that could fundamentally impact the design of legislation and regulation for consumer protection in finance.
In all our research efforts, we strive to maintain an independent voice that speaks for the low-income household and household enterprises. Our ability to perform this function is significantly enhanced by our commitment to disseminate as a pure public good, all the intellectual capital that we create.
