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Reflection in a Distant Mirror: Why the West Has Misperceived the Grameen Bank's Vision of Microcredit

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Reflection in a Distant Mirror: Why the West Has Misperceived the Grameen Bank's Vision of Microcredit NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW NORTHEASTERN PUBLIC LAW AND THEORY FACULTY WORKING PAPERS SERIES NO. 13-2007 JANUARY 2007 Reflection in a Distant Mirror: WHY THE WEST HAS MISPERCEIVED THE GRAMEEN BANK’S VISION OF MICROCREDIT Rashmi Dyal-Chand Northeastern University - School of Law This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection at: http://ssrn.com/abstract= 962374 Reflection in a Distant Mirror: WHY THE WEST HAS MISPERCEIVED THE GRAMEEN BANK’S VISION OF MICROCREDIT Rashmi Dyal-Chanda Introduction The past decade has seen a groundswell of international interest in an institution that lends tiny amounts of money to impoverished rural women in Bangladesh. For those who had always thought that the “First World” could learn a few things from the “Third World,” 1 this development might seem encouraging. In this Article, I argue that it is not. a Assistant Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law. I am grateful to Sally Bould, Judith Olans Brown, Lan Cao, Dan Danielsen, Stacey Dogan, Peter Enrich, Benjamin Ericson, Karl Klare, Hope Lewis, Jim Rowan, William Simon, Emily Spieler, Lucy Williams, Margaret Woo, and participants at the Northeastern Junior Faculty Exchange for their thoughts and suggestions. An earlier version of a portion of this Article was presented at the Spring 2003 European Law Research Center conference at Harvard Law School. I wish to thank Shalanda Baker, Jeanette Blanco, Melissa Brooks, Joseph Calandrelli, Joshua Coleman, Mary Cyriac, Mama Diouf, Kevin Grant, Jean Healey, Beata Shapiro, and Heather Southwell for their terrific research assistance; Jan McNew for her outstanding administrative support; and Susan Drisko Zago and the staff at the Northeastern University Law Library for their invaluable research support. 1 I use “First World” interchangeably with the “West” and “Third World” interchangeably with the “East” in this Article because these are the terms used ubiquitously by scholars involved in Law and Development, Community Economic Pevelopment, and post-colonial studies—three areas of study that have tremendous relevance to this Article. See discussion infra Part V.B. See, e.g., HERNANDO DE SOTO, THE OTHER PATH: THE INVISIBLE REVOLUTION IN THE THIRD WORLD passim (1989); PAUL W. KAHN, THE CULTURAL STUDY OF LAW: RECONSTRUCTING LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP 4 (1999) (using the phrase “Third World” in the Law and Development context); CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY ET AL., THIRD WORLD WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF FEMINISM passim (1991); Amy L. Chua, Markets, Democracy, and Ethnicity: Toward a New Paradigm for Law and Development, 108 YALE L. J. 1, passim (1998) (using the terms “First World” and “West” interchangeably); Rebecca Johnson, Welfare/Social Justice: Where Do We Go from Here?, 19 W. NEW ENG. L. REV. 41, passim (1997) (comparing programs used to improve the economic situations of women in “Third World” countries to programs used to aid impoverished women in the United States); Audrey G. McFarlane, Race, Space, and Place: The Geography of Economic Development, 36 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 295, 298– 303 (1999) (examining how international development critiques coined the terms “First World” and “Third World”); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in MARXISM AND THE 1 41 STAN. J. INT'L L. 1 (2005) 2005 Reflection in a Distant Mirror 2 One apparent reason for the intense interest in this Bangladeshi program is that the poor everywhere, even in the United States, are getting poorer in relation to everyone else.2 Moreover, they are, now more than ever, more entrenched in their poverty and more marginalized from partaking in increasingly global markets.3 Both in the United States and abroad, there are INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE 271, 296–97 (Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg eds., 1988) (contrasting the “Third World” with the “West” in a discussion of contemporary relations of power). 2 In the United States in 1999, for example, the top 5% of households received 49.4% of total income (up from 43.8% in 1967), while the bottom 20% of households received 3.6% of total income (down from 4% in 1967). U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, CURRENT POPULATION REPORTS, MONEY INCOME IN THE UNITED STATES: 1999 (2000), available at http://www.census.gov (last visited Apr. 23, 2005). In addition, in 1995, the top 10% of U.S. households owned 71.8% of all household wealth. LISA A. KEISTER, WEALTH IN AMERICA 64 (2000). The widening gaps appear to affect the working poor as well as the very poor. Steven A. Holmes, Children Of Working Poor Are Up Sharply, Study Says, N.Y. TIMES, June 4, 1996, at C19 (suggesting that globalization negatively affects the working poor, who are generally less skilled). These trends are reflected overseas as well. See, e.g., Globalization Challenge Initiative, Growing Danger of Economic Apartheid: How the World Bank Group’s Private Sector Development (PSD) Strategy Threatens Basic Service Provision (Health, Education and Water), DEBT REDUCTION AND PRSP PROCESSES, Sept. 2001, at 1 (“In country after country, efforts [through loan conditionalities] by the World Bank Group to privatize health, education, and water systems are pushing the costs of public services out of the reach of ordinary people.”); Mahmood Monshipouri, Promoting Universal Human Rights: Dilemmas of Integrating Developing Countries, 4 YALE HUM. RTS. & DEV. L.J. 25, 32 (2001) (“Even those analysts who stress the tremendous potential benefits that globalization has for developing countries, warn about the ways in which globalization exacerbates inequality and heightens social tensions . Globalization—in particular, privatization—presents considerable risks of concentration of wealth unless undertaken with effective regulation.”); DAVID SANDERS & MICKEY CHOPRA, Globalization and the Challenge of Health for All: A View from Sub-Saharan Africa, in HEALTH IMPACTS OF GLOBALIZATION: TOWARDS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE 105, 118 (K. Lee ed., 2003) (“[T]he forces of globalization . have had continuing negative impacts on poor families and on their social safety net, including basic health care.”). See generally MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY, THE GLOBALIZATION OF POVERTY: IMPACTS OF THE IMF AND WORLD BANK REFORMS (1997). But see David Dollar & Aart Kraay, Spreading the Wealth, FOREIGN AFF., Jan.–Feb. 2002, at 120, 120–21 (“[T]he current wave of globalization, which started around 1980, has actually promoted economic equality and reduced poverty . In general, higher growth rates in globalizing developing countries have translated into higher incomes for the poor.”). Unless otherwise specified, I use the terms “poor” and “poverty” to refer to the working poor and the poorest of the poor. Moreover, I typically intend my usage to be broad enough in scope to encompass both technical definitions of the terms based on such things as income levels as well as more common usage. 3 See Holmes, supra note 2; Hope Lewis, Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights and Inter/National Black Women, 50 ME. L. REV. 309, 311 (1998); Kerry Rittich, Transformed Pursuits: The Quest for Equality in Globalized Markets, 13 HARV. HUM. RTS. J. 231, 232 (2000). See also Susan S. Silbey, “Let Them Eat Cake”: Globalization, Postmodern Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Justice, 31 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 207, 227 (1997) (“The problem, however, is more than simply the fact of inequality or of concentrations of power. The possibilities of justice are eroded under globalization primarily because that greater power has been made less visible.”). 2005 Reflection in a Distant Mirror 3 development communities4 that focus on fixing this problem by attempting to boost participation by the poor in the market, and often by implication, in mainstream5 society.6 These communities have identified at least three more specific structural problems that impede their task. I describe these problems as: 1) market failure in those markets that are accessible to the poor; 2) lack of formal participation by the poor in markets that do function; and 3) the absence 4 By development communities, I mean those scholars and practitioners who develop the theories and implement the programs of economic development. By “economic development,” which I will use interchangeably with “development,” I mean attempts to erase class differences among individuals by increasing the economic (and thus social) status of low-income individuals. Therefore, my use of the terms “economic development” and “development” encompasses initiatives both in the United States and in the developing world. 5 I use the term “mainstream” throughout this Article to refer to a market that is not subject to widespread or consistent market failure and/or to the market in which the middle and upper classes participate. I use this term to maintain consistent terminology with others who have written about problems of market failure in the credit market and lack of access by the poor to the credit market. See WILLIAM H. SIMON, THE COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT 50 (2001) (describing the Grameen bank as lending to “a huge class of rural women who had been written off as uncreditworthy by mainstream lenders”); Lan Cao, Looking at Communities and Markets, 74 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 841, 848 (1999) (discussing certain immigrant communities’ lack of access to credit from “mainstream, majority-owned banks”); Louise A. Howells, The Dimensions of Microenterprise: A Critical Look at Microenterprise as a Tool to Alleviate Poverty, 9 J. AFFORDABLE HOUSING & COMMUNITY DEV. L. 161, 161 (2000) (“Because of their focus on very small businesses, microenterprise programs have filled a significant credit gap, extending credit to small businesses overlooked by mainstream lenders.”); Jameel Jaffer, Microfinance and the Mechanics of Solidarity Lending: Improving Access to Credit through Innovations in Contract Structure, 9 J. TRANSNAT’L L. & POL’Y 183, 186 (1999) (comparing microlenders to “the mainstream banking sector”); Susan R. Jones, Representing the Poor and Homeless: Innovations in Advocacy, Tackling Homelessness through Economic Self-Sufficiency, 19 ST. LOUIS U. PUB. L. REV. 385, 393 (2000) (comparing microbusinesses to “mainstream businesses”); Laurie A.
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