Nonmarket Institutions for Credit and Risk Sharing in Low-Income Countries

The design credit and risk institutions in low-income countries provides one of the most exciting testing grounds for theories of contracting with imperfect information and limited enforcement. This paper reviews some of the recent literature, with a special focus on nonmarket institutions that cope with risk and provide credit. This literature attempts to bring together insights from economic theory, especially information economics, contract theory, and mechanism design theory. However, it is also applied, being motivated by the circumstance of the poor countries that their authors have visited and studied.