January 12, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
Bootstrap Dreams: U.S. Microenterprise Development in an Era of Welfare Reform
by Nancy C. Jurik
Providing loans to help poor people start their own businesses is a popular way to fight poverty in the developing world. Less well known are the more than 300 such programs in the United States that offer training, loans, and other support to entrepreneurs who have few resources.
In this book, Nancy C. Jurik, a professor at Arizona State University, draws on a study of 50 U.S. programs to examine how so-called microenterprise programs spread to the Northern Hemisphere and how effective they have been.
The microenterprise programs, she writes, complemented efforts by U.S. policy makers to privatize social services and find market-based solutions to reduce poverty. In practice, however, the programs sometimes departed from their goal of helping needy people create businesses.
In an eight-year study of one group, Ms. Jurik found that financial pressures led employees to screen out less-prepared and potentially problematic recipients who might drive up program costs. As a result, the program’s clientele included fewer low-income people.
Her book raises questions about the potential of microenterprise development to solve the problems of the poorest Americans.
Publisher: Cornell University Press, Box 6525, 750 Cascadilla Street, Ithaca, N.Y. 14851; http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu; 252 pages; $17.95 paper; ISBN 0-8014-8997-0.
