Search

Motivation: Despite efforts to reduce poverty, both income and multidimensional poverty continue to be high in Mexico, especially in rural areas. Most studies concerned with the effect of credit use on poverty analyse formal credit, but little is known about the impacts of different types of credit on poverty. Purpose: We investigate the impacts of the use of formal credit and informal loans obtained (primarily) for productive and investment purposes on multidimensional and income poverty of rural households in Mexico. Approach and methods: We use data from the 2013 and 2015 CONEVAL Surveys of Rural Households in Mexico, representative of rural communities with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants, to investigate the impact of credit on poverty. We apply inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to account for differences between users of formal credit, users of informal loans, and non‐users of credit. Findings: Both formal and informal credit usage reduce poverty in rural Mexico, generally with clearer impacts on moderate rather than extreme poverty. Informal credit appears to have largely reached households that could most benefit from it. Broader access to formal credit would potentially further reduce poverty. Policy implications: Public policies to reduce rural poverty should promote a greater access to the formal financial sector. Including vulnerable low‐income rural households in formal finance should be accompanied by financial education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to estimate the impact of Internet access on poverty for a sample of people living in contrasting regions located across rural Mexico. Using a quasi-experimental technique, our results suggest that Internet access is an additional mechanism that contributes to decreasing poverty levels. Consequently, it could assist in increasing the proportion of people living out of poverty in rural areas; however, this is not uniform across regions (higher positive effects are estimated for less developed regions). These findings highlight the prevailing regional heterogeneity in Mexico's rural sector and suggest that governments must design better-targeted public policies that address the uneven development in Internet diffusion typical of the rural sector. These policy improvements would allow governments to maximize the potential benefits of the Internet, as this technology alone is not sufficient to break the cycle of poverty in middle-income countries like Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to estimate the effect of using the micro-finances on the poverty, measured as the income per Mexican rural household. By using the information from the Coneval Survey to Mexican Rural Households 2013 (EnChor 2013) as well as the techniques of Propensity Score Matching , the outcomes from this research show that micro-loans help to reduce the poverty levels among the rural households in Mexico. These findings indicate the need to create public policies that will enable to incorporate higher numbers of poor households into the micro-finance market, which would improve the standard of living of the people in those areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]