Donors discriminate on the basis of attractiveness, skin color, and weight, preferring borrowers who are more attractive, who have lighter skin, and who are not overweight. The effects are statistically significant and robust, persisting across a variety of specifications and conditional on a full range of controls including country fixed effects, MFI fixed effects, economic sector and activity fixed effects, and date fixed effects. The effects are quantitatively significant. A borrower at the 75th percentile in terms of skin color (darker skin) is estimated to require 20% more time to have his or her loan funded than a borrower with lighter skin at the 25th percentile; similarly, a borrower at the 75th percentile in attractiveness (more attractive) requires almost 25% less time to receive full funding.
Donors appear to strongly prefer lending to women compared to men, making group loans instead of individual loans, and lending to borrowers from poorer countries. These preferences are in part driven by the substantial evidence circulated in the media on the success of microfinance institutions which concentrate on group lending and lending to women. However, evidence on the strong impact of attractiveness, skin color, and weight are difficult to reconcile with any consensus or even popular evidence on the value of increased capital access to more attractive, lighter skinned, skinny individuals when it comes to economic development.
D C on June 23, 2011
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It\'s something we (NGO workers) are all aware of, but won\'t (read: aren\'t allowed to) talk about. Because regardless of the amount, the racial discrimination and obscene list of conditionalities associated with grant/load/aid - 1 $ = 72 Rupees. That\'s the bottom line. So both the DONORS and NGOs will continue the same routine and this research will get buried under tons of new donor funded research reports which will prove otherwise.
So, you\'ve got two choices. Either call a spade a spade or loose your job or at least, screw your promotion/raise for the rest of your employment period. What\'s it going to be?
And it took them this long and that lengthy research to find this out !!! Donors are essentially WHITE PEOPLE, got it? White people with their imperialistic education in western colleges, dressed in suits (yeah, the women too), comfy in their air conditioned office, proud of their self given mandate to save the BLACK, BROWN and YELLOW natives with resources which essentially their imperialist forefathers had STOLEN and LOOTED for hundreds of years.
And now they have the World Bank, IMF, AfDB and ADB to continue this looting using the biggest joke of our time - DEVELOPMENT AID. And all this just to keep these colored people\'s economy barely rolling enough to keep and grow a market for their own corporate to dominate and control - like their forefathers once did.
So what else do you expect from them? Banana maybe ...