Ex Post Monitoring and Loan Repayment Performance in Rural Vietnam

Loan monitoring is a fundamental element of credit control. The importance of loan monitoring is to reduce loan defaults and to increase loan repayment performance. The ex-post monitoring can also increase the loan quality and thus a concern to many creditors in the market economy. This study identifies the role of ex-post monitoring on loan repayment performance in the context of rural Vietnam. Employing primary data from rural areas of Vietnam, this study investigates the impacts of ex-post monitoring on loan repayment performance of individual borrowers in terms of on-time loan repayment and the rate of loan repayment. Descriptions of borrower demographics, loan information, and ex-post monitoring show the initial picture of borrowers and loans in Vietnam's rural areas. Quantitative estimations that use the Probit and the Tobit model confirm the argument that better ex-post monitoring would result in better loan repayment performance in both on-time repayment and repayment rate. Thus, some policy suggestions have been made to improve the monitoring system in each financial institution. The study also indicates that some other factors too affect loan repayment performance such as borrower's characteristics (education, agricultural working area, and income) as well as loan's characteristics (loan size, maturity, and loan purpose).