PRAGATI : Journal of Indian Economy

Kanishka Sethi ¹, Reshma Nasreen ¹, Matloobullah Khan ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Management, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, Delhi, IN

Abstract

A strong presence of the microfinance sector has been felt in many developing economies of the world. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyse and -compare the performance of the industry in six South Asian countries namely Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka which are geographically near to each other. To evaluate the performance of these countries, Fixed Effects panel data estimations in E-views has been used. A significant difference in performance has been witnessed on all 14 parameters of performance. Extensive manual calculations have been done to compare and rank the countries based on the selected parameters. Bangladesh bags the first position closely followed by India while Afghanistan ranks last. A theoretical framework has been developed to understand and analye the reasons for the difference in the performance of the six countries.

Keywords

Microfinance, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX).

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