Relevance of Imperfect Information Arguments
for Rural Financial Markets
It seems obvious that the analysis of information problems has general relevance for rural financial markets in developing countries, because it is hard
to imagine that unobservable actions and characteristics do not play some part
in the way in which the formal credit sector deals with farmers. The concern
here is to examine more precisely what institutional features of rural financial
markets can be explained by information imperfections and how these features
can be related to arguments for government intervention.
For example, information imperfections are potentially important in explaining the segmentation of credit markets. Information flows are typically
well established only over relatively close distances and within social groups,
making it likely that financial institutions, at least indigenous ones, will tend
to work with relatively small groups. Among such groups, characteristics of
individuals tend to be well known, and monitoring borrowers' behavior may
be relatively inexpensive. Such considerations also suggest why informal finance is used so extensively in rural areas.3
This claim is consistent with the many studies of informal rural financial
markets available, several of which are collected in a special issue of the World
Bank Economic Review (1990: 4, no. 3, September). For example, Udry's (1990)
study of Nigeria finds that individuals tend to lend to people they know in order to economize on information flows. Similar evidence has been found for
Thailand (see Siamwalla and others 1990) and Pakistan (see Aleem 1990). The
fact that individuals form into groups that intermediate funds is not inconsistent with efficiency in investment decisions once enforcement costs and information difficulties are recognized, although there may be a case for facilitating
flows of funds across segmented groups.
In contrast to small local lenders, formal institutions can usually intermediate funds over larger groups. Formal institutions suffer from greater problems
of imperfect information, however, and are most susceptible to the kinds of
inefficiencies discussed above. In this context, the formal sector naturally suffers a greater default problem.
One view says that the informal sector serves as lender of last resort to those
who are unable to obtain finance in the formal sector-the people to whom
the formal bank is reluctant to lend because of their characteristics and the cost
of collecting information about them. A related argument is that the transactions costs of lending to this group are prohibitive, very often because the loans
they demand are so small. This, by itself, does not argue for any kind of intervention, but shifting more people to the formal sector-through government
subsidization of loans in the formal sector, for example-could bring a beneficial externality by making market segmentation easier to overcome. The argument for reducing the size of the informal sector does, however, rest
crucially on the belief that a formal bank has a comparative advantage in certain activities, such as managing loan portfolios across areas