2016年中科院考博英语真题5

考博英语责任编辑：王觅 2019-02-13

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Passage Three

Microfinance is an anti-poverty tool. If you make small loans to groups of poor women, they always repay them on time. Microfinance has grown rapidly in many countries. Yet the industry has come under attack for being too commercial.

In Bangladesh the government has capped the annual interest rate that microfinance institutions (MFIs) can charge at 27%. In Andhra Pradesh (AP), the Indian state with the most microfinance borrowers, local politicians have bullied the business to a virtual halt. These steps are ostensibly motivated by a desire to defend the poor from getting stuck in a debt. But they are wrong-headed. Despite charging seemingly high interest rates, MFIs typically have thin margins because of the high costs of making and collecting payments on millions of tiny loans. Pressing them to reduce rates further would jeopardize their ability to attract private capital, inhibiting their growth.

In fact, the poor often use microloans to pay off far more expensive loans from village moneylenders. This suggests that restricting people’s access to microcredit by capping rates could have the perverse effect of driving more poor people into the arms of village loan-sharks. That would be good news for these moneylenders, but is surely not the outcome that policymakers want. Sensible regulation need not be at odds with a thriving microfinance industry. Peru, for example, is ranked as having the best business environment for microfinance, in part because the regulator has successfully set and enforced rules on capital buffers, leading to a more stable environment for the industry. India, in contrast, is yet to decide whether rules governing microfinance are to be set at the national level or by individual states.

Many things can be done. For instance, an association of Indian MFIs is trying to set up a credit bureau which would allow them to track clients’ overall indebtedness and credit histories, thus guarding them against lending a person more than she is able to handle. This would be helped enormously if the government sped up its efforts to give all Indians a universal identification number. The Indian government should also allow MFIs to take deposits, which they are currently prevented from doing: this would make them less dependent on capital markets for funding. Actually there are more useful measures for the poor than an interest-rate cap.

48. The microfinance industry is under attack because •

A. it develops too fast B. it offers small loans

C. it over-emphasizes business D. it is an anti-poverty tool

49. The underlined phrase in Paragraph 2 most probably means •

A. to set a maximum annual interest rate

B. to change the annual interest rate

C. to relax the control of the annual interest rate

D. to reduce the annual interest rate

50. According to the author, MFIs are not making a big profit because .

A. the interest rates are too low

B. the handing of numerous small loans is expensive

C. they fail to attract private capital.