Publication: The Impact of Commitment Savings Accounts : The Case of Malawi
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2011-08
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2012-08-13
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In order to understand the impact of facilitating access to savings accounts and to examine the importance of these barriers for formal savings, author designed a field experiment among smallholder cash crop farmers in Malawi. In partnership with a local microfinance institution, author randomized offers of account-opening and deposit assistance for formal savings accounts. In order to test the importance of individual self-control problems or pressure to share resources with others in the social network, treated farmers were randomly assigned to one of two types of savings interventions. The first group was offered an 'ordinary' bank account with standard features. The second group was offered the ordinary account as well as a 'commitment' savings account.
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“Gine, Xavier. 2011. The Impact of Commitment Savings Accounts : The Case of Malawi. Finance & PSD Impact; No. 15. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10081 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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The following sections describe the lack of formal savings options for rural farmers, the behavioral concept behind commitment savings accounts, the product designed to address these problems and subsequent changes to the original design, results of a field experiment evaluating the product, and lessons learned for other commitment savings products.
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