Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the late 1990s, microcredit attracted the attention of Canadian policy-makers as a promising solution to problems of access to loan capital for small business startups. During the same period, Canada's largest microcredit provider arrived at the conclusion that microcredit was not a sustainable form of lending in Canada and other countries of the North. Drawing on the tension between these two perspectives, this article analyses the potential and the limits of microcredit in the Canadian context. The article elaborates on the elements of the microloan transaction, explores microeconomic rationales for this distinctive form of lending and examines the record of Canada's major microcreditor. It argues that microcredit failed to meet the objective of stimulating the development of very small businesses because the core lending technology - the peer supported loan--imposes substantial implicit costs on debtors in addition to the explicit prices they must pay for the loans, and shows that debtors' responses to Canada's most ambitious microcredit programme support this claim. While the article questions the project of encouraging microenterprise as a local development strategy, it suggests that expansion of access to loan capital requires a focus on the lending technologies of conventional financial service suppliers rather than support for microcredit intermediaries. The article concludes by noting the development of small business versions of consumer credit instruments, such as credit cards, and consumer lending technologies, such as credit scoring and suggests that these developments may signify an emerging process of "consumerization" of small business lending that warrants further investigation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".