The present study was carried out to identify the determinants of microcredit accessibility by rural women households and its impact on rural women empowerment in Bangladesh. A face-to-face survey was conducted during 2018, interviewing 300 women households in two locations in Bangladesh. Descriptive statistics and econometric modeling were used to achieve the objectives. The results of the study showed that the higher annual income inversely related with the accessibility to the microcredit program, whereas family size (P <0.05) was positive and significantly influenced the accessibility to the microcredit program. The empirical results indicate that borrowers of microcredit have greater control over their own savings. The regression outcome also exposes that microcredit has a positive and significant impact on enhancing participation in household decision making process and women’s legal awareness. The study suggested that microcredit providers in Bangladesh should be encouraged to review their program planning and redesign loan products by putting more emphasis on higher income group women.
The consumers are becoming more conscious about the increasingly harmful effects of chemicals in food. The trend towards buying organic food is increasing worldwide including Pakistani consumers. It is a dire need of time to understand what factors persuade consumers to turn towards organic food. This empirical study is aimed at explaining the factors that influence willingness to pay (WTP) for organic food of urban consumers in Pakistan. This study used survey data collected from 600 consumers in the Central Punjab Pakistan during September to November 2017. Structured questionnaires were randomly distributed among the academic staffs, students of different universities and customers in different fruit and vegetable markets. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the data. Results indicate that consumers who were interested in buying the organic food products were likely to buy a more significant quantity of those products. The willingness to buy (WTB) organic food depends upon the attitudes, subjective norms, organic food knowledge, availability and labeling & certification. However, the health concern is ranked 1 st among all these. Moreover, perceived expensiveness, culture, and environmental concerns have less effect or negative impact on WTP. A contribution of this paper lies in providing marketing strategies for organic food vendors to cut down the barriers which consumers face while purchasing organic food in the country. Further research may explore the role of more motivating factors to have a better understanding about consumer's more WTP for safe food.
Summary This research article effort to empirically assess the effect of microcredit on household economic welfare consequences, for example income and consumption in rural Pakistan. The valuation is based on the difference‐in‐difference method that is a progressively popular technique of tackling the selection bias issue in measuring the influences of microcredit. This paper uses a 2‐year panel data set, together with both primary and secondary data gained through a household survey in rural Pakistan. Our empirical outcomes favour the full belief in the literature that participates in microcredit programme helps expand households' economic welfare, for example income and consumption. Despite the positive results on how microcredit has improved the rural households' living status, our outcomes display that the huge majority of the program applicants are non‐poor, which casts roughly uncertainties on the social potential (for example poverty alleviation) of Pakistan's microcredit programs. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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