ROSCAs and Credit Unions : Is Modern Japan Missing Something?
Stephen Jarratt Davies
What the paper says
This paper discusses two forms of "microfinance ", both of which are common in some other parts of the world but almost entirely lacking in modern Japan. The Rotating Credit and Saving Association (R0SCA) had a long history in Japan in the form of the kou or mujin, and remained important until after the Second World War, but has almost completely disappeared from Japan in the last fifty years. The community-based credit union, which has in many deve1oped countries become an important source of small-scale unsecured finance for households, with millions of members, in Japan remains almost entirely confined to Roman Catholic parishes, with a total membership now of less than 5, 000. This anomalous lack of community-based microfinance in Japan is at least in part a consequence of the privileged status of the postal savings system and of government guarantees of bank deposits.
2 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.31 × 0.4 = 0.12 |
| M · momentum | 0.20 × 0.15 = 0.03 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.