ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes a welter of informal financial arrangements in a variety of geographic, political, economic, and cultural settings. It shows that the relative importance of informal loans has declined, but went on to stress that this is largely due to rapid growth in formal lending. The book argues that savings-deposits were an important element in developing sustainable financial intermediation. It focuses on various aspects of group savings and deposits. Informal finance is difficult and costly to study because of its heterogeneity, its dispersed nature, its small transactions, its ties with marketing arrangements, and lack of written records. Much of the traditional thinking about informal finance emphasizes negative aspects: usury, monopoly profits, labor bonding through lending, and loan defaults leading to collateral seizure by lenders.
