Downloading - Microfinance Information Exchange
Downloading - Microfinance Information Exchange
Downloading - Microfinance Information Exchange
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APPENDICES<br />
Statistical Issues<br />
The Bulletin reports the average of performance<br />
indicators for each peer group. At this stage, peer<br />
groups are still small and the observations in each<br />
peer group show a high degree of variance. Outliers<br />
distort the results of some of the peer group<br />
averages. Consequently, the reader should be cautious<br />
about the interpretive power of these data.<br />
Over time, as more MFIs provide data, we will be in<br />
a better position to generate deeper and more sophisticated<br />
types of analyses and will have a higher<br />
degree of comfort with the statistical significance of<br />
the differences between the means of the distinct<br />
peer groups.<br />
In the case of peer groups where outliers distort the<br />
average result, reader may want to use the median<br />
value for analysis. The median value is the point in<br />
the sample at which 50% of the observations lie<br />
above the result and 50% lie below it.<br />
The electronic version of the Bulletin tables contains<br />
a more extensive set of data, including all<br />
other descriptive statistics for each indicator and<br />
each peer group: average, median, standard deviation,<br />
minimum, maximum and number of observations.<br />
These tables can be found online at<br />
www.mixmbb.org.<br />
70 MICROBANKING BULLETIN, MARCH 2005