Empirical Study on the Key Influencing Factors and Development Mechanisms for the Sustainability of Microfinance Institutions Based on a Survey of Chinese Microcredit Companies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for your paper, it covers an interesting topic. You should, however, work on presenting your finding in a way more consistent with the literature. For example your tables are in a format which is not common in other empirical work.

Your english is quite good, maybe use a grammar tool to clean the remaining grammatical inconsistencies.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable revision comments. 

Some revision and adjustments have been made in this paper and several errors have been cleaned.

Reviewer 3 Report

General remarks

The paper deals with a very interesting topic — the factors affecting MFIs activities in Zhejiang Province, China. That said, a major revision is needed to further enhance the paper’s quality.

Introduction

-Upon reading the introduction, one questions the paper’s rationale. The introduction should be in the form of an inverted pyramid; that is, you should start from the general context to the specific. As you do so, you should indicate what’s wrong, and why this is a problem. This approach would enable you to clearly show the relevance of your study. More precisely, your introduction section should have the following ingredients:

•          Short and sharp, with an attention getting device at the start (your first paragraph is great!)

•          Present the core argument or question within the first few paragraphs;

•          Should be well linked with the rest of the paper;

•          Should be well linked with the conclusion and findings;

•          Previews the structure of the paper to come (e.g., The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. The next section outlines our methodology and subsequently…), as this will guide the readers.

-Also, you make several sweeping statements in your introduction with no citation to back them. For example, “Microfinance has enjoyed impressive success over the past 30 years and developed sustainable institutional systems which could provide systematic financial services to the poor in some countries.” (p. 1, lines 35 – 37). This statement is problematic. You need to qualify how you define “success” due to the avalanche of scholarly articles which attest the contrary. See, for example,

Mader, P. (2018). Contesting financial inclusion. Development and change, 49(2), 461-483.

Bateman, M. (2012). The role of microfinance in contemporary rural development finance policy and practice: imposing neoliberalism as ‘best practice’. Journal of Agrarian Change, 12(4), 587-600.

Guermond, V., Parsons, L., Vouch, L. L., Brikell, K., Michiels, S., Fay, G., ... & Picchioni, F. (2022). Microfinance, over-indebtedness and climate adaptation: new evidence from rural Cambodia.

Duvendack, M. (2011). What is the evidence of the impact of microfinance on the well-being of

poor people? A systematic review. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/57a08aeeed915d622c0009bb/Microfinance2011Duvendackreport.pdf

3. Theoretical Analysis and Research Hypothesis

Which theory informs your study?

-Also, your hypothesis should be a stand-alone sentence, which readers can easily identify. It shouldn’t be embedded in a paragraph.

4. Survey Design and Data Collection

-Your survey design is thin in details. More precisely,

1) why was Zhejiang Province selected?

2) How were these microfinance companies selected?

3) Why did you select these companies?

4) Which sampling method did you use to recruit participants for your study?

5) What are the limitations of your study?

6. Further Discussion

-This section should be relabelled as “Discussion”.

-You present your findings but make little attempt to interpret them. Specifically, what do your findings mean? Answering this question requires engaging with existing research, which unfortunately is lacking in the manuscript.

7. Conclusions

-Provide the theoretical and policy implications of your findings.

Other comments

-There are several grammatical errors and odd sentences throughout the manuscript which affect the quality of the paper.

Good luck with the revision!

The paper has serious language issues which must be addressed before it is published.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable revision comments.

Response:  1. Two literatures, that is “Datta, S., & Sahu, T. N. (2022). How far is microfinance relevant for empowering rural women? An empirical investigation. Journal of Economic Issues, 56(1), 97-112” and “Datta & Sahu, (2020). Livelihood Transformation through Microfinance: An Empirical Investigation on Tribal Entrepreneurs in India. International Journal of Business Innovation and Research. DOI: 10.1504/IJBIR.2020.10034856”are inserted as the citation to back the paper. At the same time, the word of success is replaced to development to avoid the misunderstandings and arguments. A small paragraph is added in the end of this part for the guidance of readers.

2.The hypothesis isrearranged as a stand-alone sentence. And This section “ Further Discussion” is relabelled as “6. Discussion”.

3.The questionnaire has been provided to the editorial board, and you can get it from the editorial board for more details later. 

4.A small paragraph on how this study help in the betterment of the development of Microfinance in the further is added after the last paragraph.

5.Some revision and adjustments have been made and several errors have been cleaned in this paper.

Thanks for your valuable revision comments again.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have addressed the issues I raised in the previous draft.

Minor English editing required.