What key questions are needed to investigate the impact of micro-finance banks on small and medium scale enterprises and the growth of an economy

If you were going to try to investigate this subject, you
would need to ask a number of questions.

• As far
  as overall growth of the economy, you could use the usual macro-level statistics like
  GDP and unemployment rates.  You could ask how those statistics have varied as levels of
  microcredit have changed.

However, just looking
at these numbers would be pretty crude as there are so many intervening variables that
could confuse the causal relation between the banks and the growth.  Therefore, you
might want to concentrate more on impacts that could be directly attributable to these
banks.

In that case, you might want to
ask:

• How many small and medium scale enterprises
  were financed by these banks?


• How much money was borrowed
  by such enterprises?


• How many of these enterprises were
  able to remain successful?  How many defaulted on their loans or went out of
  business?


• If it is possible, you might want to ask how
  many of those businesses would have been able to get financing from more traditional
  banks.


• Are there geographical clusters of businesses
  receiving this funding?  If so, did the unemployment rates or income rates of these
  areas change during the time that microcredit
  rose?

These will be some of the major questions
that you will need to address.