Microcredit: a social policy to reduce poverty?
Name: VICENTE DE PAULO COLODETI
Publication date: 16/12/2011
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| MAURICIO DE SOUZA SABADINI | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: Using bibliographical and documental research, this study aims at achieving two main goals: a) knowing and analyzing the limitations and potentialities of
microcredit grant a supposed social policy to significantly reduce poverty
in Brazil; b) critically analyzing a set of theoretical arguments that are clearly
favorable to developing microcredit programs aiming at attacking poverty and that, together, compose what we call here pro-microcredit theory. For this purpose, we used some of the main theoretical productions that are favorable to microcredit, institutional and governmental documents with data on the modus operandi of this kind of credit grant in the Brazilian contemporaneity, and several data on poverty and informal labor in this country. The study discusses the diversity of theoretical conceptions of poverty, informality, and social policy, given their connections with microcredit, which, in theoretical terms, is predominantly considered as a kind of "productive, oriented" investment granted to owners of small businesses (mostly, informal ones). Microcredit is seen, as well, as an important microentrepreneurs income-generating asset, allowing them to overcome poverty. We understand that the connection between the pro-microcredit theory and the attacking poverty political agenda is based on a neoliberal conception of social reality. We conclude that the microcredit.
programs have a slight impact on reducing poverty in Brazil, and that they do
not deal with a central aspect of the poverty facing in the country: the high
concentration of the socially produced wealth.
