Book Review: Microfinance Institutions: Financial and Social Performance, Edited by Roy Mersland and R. Øystein Strøm

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2011
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Date: 01 May 2015

Strat. Change 24: 301–303 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2011 RESEARCH ARTICLE

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Strategic Change: Brie ngs in Entrepreneurial Finance

Strategic Change

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2011

Book Review:

Micro nance Institutions: Financial and

Social Performance

, Edited by Roy Mersland and

R. Øystein Strøm

Carlo Milana

Birkbeck College , University of London , UK

 e spectacular explosive growth of the micro nance industry and its institutions,

now serving hundreds of millions of customers around the world, has become a

well-known and widespread ‘business.’ As such, it has also become an important

subject area of research where questions regarding performance, e ciency, and

sustainability of micro nance are rigorously addressed.  is same journal has

dedicated two special issues in 2012 and 2013 to this subject area and the last

three (including the present one) to micro nance and crowdfunding, with a total

number of 39 articles in two years.  e book reviewed here is therefore particularly

welcome. 1

 e book collects 12 contributions by leading scholars plus two introductory

chapters by the editors, which add value-added to the literature by measuring and

discussing the performance, e ciency, and sustainability of the micro nance

institutions (MFIs) in their pursuit of dual ( nancial and social) objectives. As the

editors declare in the introduction, ‘the central question we seek to answer in this

book is what in uences the performance of micro nance institutions’ (p. 1). Fol-

lowing the introductory chapter, they have written a second chapter on measure-

ment extended to  nancial sustainability, outreach, and costs that are commonly

used in micro nance.  ey consider this chapter important ‘because such an

overview is missing from the literature and because this may guide future research’

(p. 3).

Roy Mersland and R. Øystein Strøm (editors). Micro nance Institutions:

Financial and Social Performance . New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2014 ,

300 pages.

1 A number of running conferences have been held while dedicated journals have

appeared, for example Enterprise Development & Micro nance , and special thematic

issues have been published in other journals.  ese include, for example, the special

issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (Vol. 7, no. 1, January 2015)

just published with six case studies and a cover article.