The Impact of Interest Rate Ceilings on Microfinance Industry

Abstract

Imposing ceilings on the interest rate has recently become one of the new hottest topics in microfinance industry; various debates have been discussing this issue to know the effect of interest rate ceilings on the supply of credit in particular and on microfinance industry in general. However in spite of the good intention behind these ceilings, there was no absolute result stating that ceilings have really contributed to the improvement or protection of the poor clients, indeed, these ceilings have hurt those low income people instead of helping them, due to these ceilings most of MFIs left the market or reduced their scale due to the inability to continue operating with low interest rate leaving the very poor clients without access to credit. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review the impact of imposing such ceilings on the interest rates and to find out what alterative solutions can be employed as substitutes for them. This paper is entirely based on the secondary data collected from various records related to microfinance such as microfinance books, official websites and reports, published papers, and other sources related to the research subject.