Making Good Money: Microcredit, Commercial Financing, and Social Regulation in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area

Making Good Money: Microcredit, Commercial Financing, and Social Regulation in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area

2009

Latin America and the Caribbean

Paraguay

This dissertation project examines the relationship in social practice between forms of commercial capitalism and microcredit based economic development in Paraguay?s free trade zone of Ciudad del Este. This project is an effort to triangulate the modes of social regulation that produce forms of obligation and attachment through debt instruments as well as the modes of social differentiation that separate and distinguish different forms of credit in Ciudad del Este for businesses that face pervasive economic exclusion.

Caroline Schuster

Caroline Schuster is a doctoral candidate in the Sociocultural Anthropology department of the University of Chicago. Her research interests center on microcredit-based poverty alleviation programs, which build on training in Development Studies at Stanford University, where she completed her undergraduate degree in 2005.