The study analyses the impact of microfinance on households and productive micro-enterprises in the Dominican Republic. It focuses on measuring the effect of access to credit on the welfare of households and micro-enterprises, taking as its baseline the data from the Impact of Microfinance on Social Welfare Study (Encuesta de Impacto de las Microfinanzas en el Bienestar Social: IMBS), carried out with a group of micro-enterprises that had received loans from the country’s Reserves Foundation (Fundación Reservas del País) and another group of small companies that had received no credit from any financial institution in the previous twelve months.  

It demonstrates that credit, appropriately granted, leads to an improvement in the standard of living of those who are directly and indirectly involved in micro-enterprises.

The behaviour of the variables was analysed by gender and it was shown that women have a high participation in the world of microfinance, but that they take out significantly smaller loans than men, independently of their level of educational attainment or their sector of activity.