Social and financial inclusion. The experience of microcredit in Italy

Financial markets, in their traditional configuration, sometimes appear inadequate to meet needs different from economic and financial ones. The current economic situation, along with the deterioration of poverty conditions, the growing difficulty of access to credit and the increasing use of illegal financing channels, pushes to consider other positive experiences of financial inclusion, such as microcredit, that in opposed to the logic of profit maximization, promote values and intangible assets that market fails to produce, in order to achieve the democratization of the economy and a greater spread of wealth. The term “microcredit” is referred to an inclusion tool, with varied characters pursuing social or business purposes, no longer addresses only to the poorest sections of society, but it can be useful also to so-called “new poor”, one of the social groups most affected by financial crisis. The existence of a very fragmented framework leads, however, to ask whether microcredit could be considered as a unitary instrument both for significant differences in terms of potential social and territorial impacts, both for the various types of microcredit adopted at a local scale. This paper intend to describe territorial intensity of microcredit demand in correlation with the presence of some territorial fragility factors, and to identify, at the same time, peculiarities of purposes and promoters of micro loans, according to different conditions of weakness ex- pressed by communities.