This study investigates the impact of microfinance on poverty and socio-economic vulnerability of women and the ability to form social capital through group-based micro loans. The study uses four criteria to examine the impact of microfinance on poverty and vulnerability of women borrowers. The four criteria are, access, creation and control over private resources; freedom of decision making at home; self-confidence on socio-economic activities; and status in community and family. The study assumes that if these four variables have positively affected a woman, then she is empowered by microfinance received. The study uses three logistic regression models and a women's empowerment index to analyse women's empowerment. The logistic results revealed that the household income level before taking microcredit, age of the household head and market availability for products have been significant in affecting women's empowerment and reducing vulnerability. The disaggregated and overall Women Empowerment Indices (WEIs) clearly illustrate a considerable development after joining the microfinance institutions (MFIs). The analysis found that if the woman owned the loan and acted as a conduit of credit, it had a positive and significant impact on her ability to make decisions at home.

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This article compares the political processes involved in food subsidy policies in Sri Lanka and Zambia and relates these experiences to the concept of 'good government' that western nations have been promoting. The Sri Lankan case illustrates the workings of the policy process in a democratic political system, albeit one that centralized considerably in the 1980s. The Zambian case illustrates the policy process in a one-party state that returned to multi-party democracy in 1991. Despite their very different political systems the nature of food subsidy policies show striking similarities: decades of high levels of non-targeted consumer subsidies that placed great demands on public expenditure until radical reductions in expenditure occurred following an electorally based change of government and multilateral agency pressure. Differences in the processes of policy formulation and public accountability are explored. They reveal that neither case study functioned as democratic theory would predict. The conclusion points to the inability of the concept of 'good government' to model the empirical experiences reported in the article.

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