摘要
The purpose of this paper is to study the factors determining the performance （organizational, social, and financial） of conventional and Islamic microfinance institutions and their impact on maintaining the sustainability of these institutions. A panel data on a sample of 333 conventional and 49 Islamic microfinance institutions （MFIs） between 1996 and 2012 of six different regions is used for this purpose and analyzes using the simple linear regression technique. The results show that the sustainability measered by operational autonomy （OSS） of Islamic MFIs （IMFIs） is sensitive to their social performance （SP）, while the sustainability of Conventional MFIs （CMFIs） is sustained by their Financial Performance （FP） measured by return on assets （ROA）. Thus, these latter seem to deviate from the main social objective focusing more on profitability. Indeed, this judgement is confirmed when the results also showed that their （CMFIs） FP is positively affected by the quality of credit portfolios which reveals the category of the targeted clients （the poorest of the poor are abandoned）. On the contrary, FP of IMFIs seems to be mainly supported by their specific source of funding through the islamic financial contracts where the results revealed that their profitabilty is positively affected by their capital structure. Moreover, the results show that the organizational performance positively affects the sustainability of the two categories of MFIs.
