The Role of Guarantees in support of Entrepreneurial Microcredit in Italy.

This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the microcredit initiatives promoted by local and cooperative credit banks trying to take advantage of any differences in the initiatives promoted by other types of operators in terms of default rates of loans. The differences are analyzed on the basis of distinctive features to identify a possible way of developing microcredit in Italy. The empirical analysis verifies the existence of a statically significant correlation between characteristics of the entrepreneurial microcredit programs and their default risk. The presence of credit guarantee schemes and the role of banking intermediaries as promoters reduce significantly the risk of default on these initiatives. The Italian microcredit programs do not show territorial differences.