The Reserve Bank of India has published on its website, a discussion paper on Banking Structure in India – The Way Forward which covers the following aspects:

Gary Hustwit’s documentary film, Urbanized (2011), presents an optimistic overture about the future of cities, but is not unchecked with caution.

The fast emerging small business loan (SBL) segment caters to the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and entrepreneurs which typically find it difficult to access funds through traditional sources.

For the first time in the history of the world, more than half of the world’s population live in urban areas. In the next 13 years, a billion people are expected to migrate to cities, twice as fast as the rate just 30 years ago.

Rosenberg et al. recently published a report on Microcredit Interest Rates and Their Determinants covering the period 2004 to 2011

A friend pointed me to an interesting new book recently, “Inside China’s Shadow Banking: the Next Subprime Crisis”. This is written by an investment banker turned shadow banker, Joe Zhang.

Continuing our focus on Municipal Finance, we look at the financial statements of Srirangapatna TMC in Karnataka in this post. We are currently working with the town of Srirangapatna as a part of IFMR Finance Foundation’s Financial Access for Small Cities initiative. In this post, we examine the town’s finances over the past ten years and find similarities to national trends.

Financial inclusion is a key enabler of economic and social development. The effectiveness of the financial inclusion agenda in India can be significantly enhanced if there are objective ways to measure it.

The financial-legal framework envisaged by the FSLRC comprises nine important components, one of which is Micro-prudential regulation.

As a part of our series on Municipal Finance, we present a summary of Anand Sahasranaman’s paper on Pragmatic Municipal Finance Reforms in India, published in the November 2012 edition of Environment and Urbanisation Asia