Borrowers' characteristics and their impact on repayment behaviour in Sri Lanka. An application of discriminant and logistic models (PDF)

Document from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, , course: ECONOMICS, language: English, abstract: The main objective of the study is to identify the borrower characteristics that discriminate them into defaulters and non- defaulters and examine the determinants of loan repayment and their credit worthiness in Microfinance institutions in Vavuniya district in Sri Lanka. In line with above general objective, this study has the following specific objectives:

To identify the borrower characters those classify them into defaulters and non-defaulters in the study area.
To evaluate the impact of major demographic characters such as age, gender, levels of education, civil status and family members of the borrowers that impact on their repayment performance and credit worthiness.
To investigate how the farming characters like income, farm size, ownership of land, farming experience and availability of non-farm income as well as farmers' attributes such as purposes of loan, crop failure, weather conditions and knowledge about loans affect loan repayment and discriminate the borrowers into two groups in the study area.

Financial institutions and banks have major role in financial sector as well as rural sector of an economy in terms of providing loans to the rural community in developing countries like Sri Lanka. The borrowers especially, farmers are able to get the loans from the microfinance institutions to improve their living standard through agricultural activities and generate their income. Even the borrowers have chances to receive the loans, the microfinance institutions and banks are facing the problems to recover the loans from the borrowers. Thus, default rate among the borrowers has been increasing over time which is the difficult task to manage the banks and financial institutions. There are a number of many factors particularly demographic and farming characters that affect the loan repayment rates. There has not been any empirical research conducted regarding to repayment performance among the borrowers who get the loans from SANASA Thrift, Credit and Cooperative Society (TCCS) banks in Vavuniya district. Therefore, this study tries to provide the relevant information for a better understanding on the determinants of loan repayment performance of the borrowers and the information will be useful for policy makers, other lending institutions and stakeholders for their future decision making on granting the loans for their clients.