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International audience; This article applies the capabilities approach in order to analyse microcredit as a tool for resource conversion permitting poor households to take advantage of latent opportunities. This approach calls for linking microcredit with the choices of the poor themselves. A sample of 290 rural households from the Madagascar highlands has been surveyed two consecutive years. To characterize the dimensions of poverty based on social practices of the poor and to inform about the most relevant dimensions available for a conversion process, data have been processed by a factor analysis. A hierarchical classification then permits the distribution of the households over three capabilities levels. Finally, an ordered multinomial logit brings out how microcredit influences the likelihood that a household receiving such a loan will reach a higher capability level. The main findings indicate that the microcredit represents a robust means to obtain a higher level of capability regardless the starting situation. Moreover, when the process of borrowing endures, poor households enter into a learning process which increases the effect of microcredit. Regardless of the gender of the household head, microcredit increases the probability to reach an enhanced level of capability, except for the poorest household headed by a woman. The education of the head of household improves the effect of microcredit only if the productive system implemented needs competences related to the educational attainment. JEL classification: O12, I32, G21

International audience; After fifty years of almost continuous economic growth in Thailand, it is now possible to re-evaluate the developmental process of the education system. Until now, the structural indicators of education development that have been mainly used are the level and pace of the increases in public expenditure on education, the effect of increasing enrolment on social mobility, and the private and public distribution of investment in education. The impact of these factors undeniably offers a better understanding of the quantitative advances in education. However, the dynamics of the education system nowadays encounter structural limits related to both the integration of what is now widespread education within the social structures and Thailand's contribution to globalization. As a result, the contribution of education to the growth regime is increasingly questioned. The aim of this paper is to use a historical approach to explore this evolution. Theoretical and historical perspectives are combined within a quantitative history methodology, drawing on new time-series.