小额信贷投资和国际财务报告准那么公允价值的挑战外文翻译 原文: Microfinance Investments and IFRS: The Fair Value Challenge Demand for microfinance products clearly exceeds supply: over 2.5 billion people, or 83% of the global market, lack access to financial services. One constraint that prevents microfinance institutions from reaching more customers is their lack of access to refinancing. Given the scarcity of donor funds and the limits of long-term domestic funding sources, seeking funding are increasingly turning to international private capital markets. The hurdles MFIs face in attracting private capital are complex and profuse.2Industry-specific characteristics, including size, a dearth of regulation, lack of internationally-recognized ratings, and location in developing and transition countries impede MFI access to international capital markets. MFIs must also overcome the challenges of attracting private capital to a new asset class. Microfinance does not fit neatly into institutional investment mandates, few institutional investors have microfinance expertise in-house, and the perception of microfinance as a risky asset class, as well as the high cost of thorough analysis relative to investment size, may discourage due diligence. Moreover, the total potential volume of institutional investors portfolios of microfinance instruments is very large relative to the limited number and small size of such investments. This may limit institutional investors ability to reap the benefits of diversification ? and may contribute to prohibitively high transaction costs Yet for investors, the challenges of investing in microfinance as an asset class do not end once the investment is made. A different type of challenge may then arise: International Financial Reporting Standards IFRS require that investments be reported at fair value. For microfinance debt instruments, fair value is used pri-marily for informational purposes in the supporting balance sheet notes see box 1. On the other hand, determining fair value for microfinance equity investments in the absence of reliable earnings and transaction data can be quite complex The purpose of this paper is to identify these challenges and to discuss how KfW approaches these issues on its way to full adoption of IFRS at year-end 2007. We begin with an overview of the current state of MFI funding and trends, focus-ing on equity and mezzanine funding. Next, we provide a brief background of IFRS, followed by a comparison of standard setters fair value definitions. We examine the options for determining fair value, including those based on market prices, and of most relevance to the case of microfinance, methodologies recommended for use in the absence of active markets. Finally, we conclude with a brief summary. The largest overall source of MFI financing is domestic, including commercial loans, savings deposits for institutions with banking licenses, and retained earnings. Yet domestic sources also pose the greatest bottleneck, which is the dearth of long-term domestic funding sources in emerging markets. The lack of developed pension systems and institutional investor funds are the primary missing links At the same time, only a small proportion of total MFI funding comes from for-eign investment, defined by CGAP as“quasi-commercial investment in equity, debt, and guarantees, made by private-sector funding arms of bilateral and multi-lateral donor agencies development investors; and by socially-motivated, privately managed investment funds financed by both public and private capital social investment funds. Yet it is difficult to make generalizations about MFI funding sources, as they vary significantly with type of institution and maturity, among other variables. One way to categorize these differences is through a “tiered approach. We regard first tier MFIs as those that are sustainable on both a financial and operational basis. The 2nd tier is comprised of promising MFIs on track toward becoming 1st tier institutions. Institutions seeking to retain their primary social objective, or unable to make the leap to financial and operational sustainability for other reasons, may prefer and may be limited to financing their operations through grants and donations?these institutions would be regarded as the 3rd tier. First tier institutions have the greatest access to domestic and international funding sources. They tend to be more mature and often have banking licenses, allowing them to fund themselves partially through deposits. Their “formalization also subjects them to a higher level of regulatory oversight, in turn requiring a higher level of management, operational and systems competency ? all of which decrease their credit risk, which makes them more attractive to domestic commercial funding sources. Because of their financial sustainability, the interest of private foreign investors focuses almost exclusively on this group. We