Springer Famine and Finance: Credit and the Great Famine of Ireland

The book uses archival data to examine how access to micro-finance credit played a role in facilitating adjustment to blight during the Great Famine of Ireland. The author argues that the worst affected districts with a microfinance fund experienced substantially smaller population declines and larger increases in buffer livestock during the famine than those districts without a fund. The potentially limited capacity of credit access to mitigate the effects of a major environmental shock on the poorest, most vulnerable borrowers is also a key topic of discussion. Review “This important book represents the best of history and economics coming together. The Irish Potato Famine provides insights into how small farmers attempted to adapt to the potato blight, and the role of small-scale loans in supporting this adaptation and mitigating the devastating famine.  This episode offers hope that increasing economic connectedness and worldwide access to small loans will help to avert the potentially devastating consequences of environmental shocks that will begin to occur with increasing frequency.” (Richard Hornbeck is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) “Tyler Beck Goodspeed shows how Loan Funds, early microfinance institutions operating in many parts of pre-famine Ireland, helped farmers both to recover from the disastrous potato crops of the mid-1840s and to adapt to new conditions in the decades that followed.  This book both makes an important contribution to the study of the Great Famine and shows how history can inform current debates about the effectiveness of micro finance.” (Peter Solar, Professor of Economics, Université Saint-Louis, Belgium) From the Back Cover parts of chapters 2 and 3, and 4 have also been published in companion articles in the Journal of Development Economics and the World Bank Economic Review. About the Author Tyler Beck Goodspeed is Junior Research Fellow in Economics at St John's College, Oxford University, UK. He was awarded his BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard University, USA, and his MPhil from Cambridge University, UK, where he was a Gates Scholar.