Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a small business owner, I've had to find ways to keep costs as low as possible while still providing customers with the ability to use their credit cards for payments. Many credit card processing companies are so expensive when it comes to fees that it started to feel like a losing proposition to offer this payment option.
Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.
Microeconomics is the study of how specific choices made by businesses, consumers and governments affect the markets for different goods and services. For example, a microeconomist might examine how price changes affect sales of apples relative to oranges.
When credit is cheaper to use and easier to arrange, people do use more of it.
If you buy an expensive thing and you never use it, I don't think there's a point to it.
The invention of the micro-loan was a big surprise to me. Who would have guessed loans of less than $20 made to poor people in undeveloped countries could create thriving local economies? And, even more surprisingly, that they more reliably pay off their debts than the wealthy of the world.
For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.
Microfinance does not require previous experience or loans to the same extent as a small-business loan, so it's easier for women to enter the micro sector.
I strongly believe in a free market, and it is great when companies make money and pay their people well.
The best companies are the ones that offer their products for free.