The impact of farm credit in Pakistan

Both informal and formal loans matter in agriculture. However, formal lenders provide many more production loans than informal lenders, often at a cost (mostly loan default cost) higher than what they can recover. For example, the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP), providing about 90% of formal loans in rural areas, incurs high loan default costs. Yet, like other governments, the Government of Pakistan supports the formal scheme on the grounds that lending to agriculture is a high risk activity because of covariate risk. Hence, such policies are often based on a market failure argument. As farm credit schemes are subsidised, policy makers must know if these schemes are worth supporting. Using a recent large household survey data from rural Pakistan (Rural Financial Market Studies or RFMS), we have attempted to estimate the effectiveness of the ADBP as a credit delivery institution. A two‐stage method that takes the endogeneity of borrowing into account is used to estimate credit impact. Results reveal that ADBP contributes to household welfare and that its impact is higher for smallholders than for large holders. Nevertheless, large holders receive the bulk of ADBP finance. The ADBP is, thus, not a cost‐effective institution in delivering rural finance. Its cost‐effectiveness can be improved by reducing its loan default cost and partially by targeting smallholders in agriculture where credit yields better results.     

Heterogeneous Demand and Supply for an Insurance‐linked Credit Product in Kenya: A Stated Choice Experiment Approach

We employ a discrete choice experiment to elicit demand and supply side preferences for insurance‐linked credit, a promising market‐based tool for managing agricultural weather risks and providing access to credit for farmers. We estimate preference heterogeneity using primary data from smallholder farmers and managers of lenders/insurers combined with household socio‐economic survey data in Kenya. We analyse the choice data using maximum simulated likelihood and Hierarchical Bayes estimation of a mixed logit model. Although there are some similarities, we find that there is conflicting demand and supply side preferences for credit terms, collateral requirements, and loan use flexibility. We also analyse willingness to buy and willingness to offer for farmers and suppliers, respectively, for the risk premium for different attributes and their levels. Identifying the preferred attributes and levels for both farmers and financial institutions can guide optimal packaging of insurance and credit providing market participation and adoption motivation for insurance‐bundled credit product.     

农户农地经营权抵押贷款可获性及其影响因素——基于农村金融改革试验区2518个农户样本

研究目的:揭示已开展农地经营权抵押贷款业务的农村金融改革试验区农户农地经营权抵押贷款可获性不高的现象并解释其原因。研究方法:问卷调查、有序Logistic回归模型。研究结果:(1)规模农户和小农户土地抵押贷款可获得性具有差异性;(2)土地产权流转市场较小、土地评估机制不健全、农户承包经营权证不随经营权流转、农村土地确权颁证尚未完成、信贷风险分摊机制等制度基石尚未完全确立等因素降低了农户农地经营权抵押贷款的可获得性。研究结论:农地经营权抵押贷款的进一步推广需要提高银行对抵押土地的处置能力,简化规模农户贷款手续,同时完善信贷风险分摊机制。     

Risk, Wealth, and Sectoral Choice in Rural Credit Markets

We model the role of the informal credit sector in developing countries. The informational advantage of informal lenders is portrayed as the ability to monitor borrowers. Monitoring reduces the incentive problem and allows for contracts with lower collateral. This enables informal lenders to serve both individuals who cannot post the collateral required by the formal sector and those who are able but do not want to post collateral. The model is consistent with the conventional view of the informal sector as recipient of spillover demand from the formal sector. It also shows that the informal sector may provide partial insurance as the lower collateral requirement implies greater consumption smoothing for borrowers.     

福建省农村信用社林权抵押贷款探索与建议

介绍了福建省农村信用社进行林权抵押贷款的主要做法,指出贷款中存在的主要问题是林权评估价值虚高、风险分散转移机制尚未建立、缺乏熟悉林业的信贷人员等。认为应从配套政策、配套服务、抵押物的管理、抵押权的处置、风险补偿、人员培训等方面完善林权抵押贷款。     

土地使用权抵押贷款风险分析

研究目的:提出防范土地使用权抵押贷款风险的策略。研究方法:综合分析法与比较分析法。研究结果:(1)从贷款抵押类型、抵押期限、土地使用权价值变化、抵押物瑕疵等方面综合分析了土地使用权抵押贷款的潜在风险;(2)土地使用权抵押贷款风险种类多样,日益凸现。研究结论:通过加强银行部门对国家政策、经济形势分析预报,合理确定抵押地块贷款类型和期限,政府部门应完善土地登记制度,防范土地使用权抵押贷款风险。     

城乡土地银行制度设计：一个新型城乡土地资本化制度探索

研究目的:针对城乡土地资源流转不畅、土地资本难以显化、农民土地财产权利保障困难等诸多问题,探索设计提供资源汇集、资金融通、资产评估、信用创造等诸多功能服务的城乡土地资本化制度。研究方法:文献研究法、比较分析法。研究结果:分析了土地资本化的本质内涵和关键难点,参考存款货币银行的功能架构和运作机制,探索设计了包含土地储备、土地存取、土地贷出和土地资本经营4大制度模块的城乡土地银行制度方案。研究结论:建议推进试点运行城乡土地银行制度,以一揽子推进城乡土地一体化调控有序、城乡土地财产权利具体显化、土地市场化流转集聚配置高效、增值收益分配公平合理和土地资本价值不断提升等制度愿景的实现,助推配置市场化、资产权益化、利益共同化、收益长期化和价值最大化的城乡土地制度改革实现。     

关于辽宁省林权抵押贷款的调查报告

介绍了辽宁省林权抵押贷款业务的开展情况,规定了林权抵押贷款的定义,介绍了抵押物的范围、评估办法以及贷款的用途、比率、期限和利率。认为林权抵押贷款目前尚存在缺乏政策指导,农村金融机构网点较少,贷款利率过高,融资成本高,贷款范围过窄等问题。提出了应规范操作,制定适宜林业生产特点的信贷政策,建立多机构参与和多渠道融资模式,建立风险防范机制等建议。     

Secure property right as a determinant of SME’s access to formal credit in Ghana: dynamics between Micro-finance Institutions and Universal Banks

Does registered land title help to improve tenure security and enhance one’s chances of securing a loan from formal financial institutions? This question continues to sharply divide opinions among academics, policy-makers and international development partners. The long running debate on the subject of ‘Property in the Commons’, which serves as the ideological origin of what has become known as ‘Washington Consensus’ in contemporary times claims that there is positive correlation between the possession of registered land title and access to credit. However, this has often received considerable rebuttals. Even if the ‘Washington Consensus’ is accepted, the argument is still laced with some fundamental difficulty because it inherently assumes and treats financial institutions as a homogenous class of business. Yet financial institutions exhibit greater diversity in their operations and decision-making process. This paper attempts to contribute towards developing improved understanding between the ‘secure land title and access to credit relationship’ by disaggregating financial institutions into Micro-finance and Universal Banks (UBs) and examining what role secure land title play in granting credit from the perspectives of these two categories of financial institutions. To achieve this, field level investigations were conducted amongst officials of both Micro-finance Institutions (MFIs) and UBs in Ghana using structured questionnaires. A total of 200 questionnaires – 100 each to MFI and Universal Banks were administered of which a response rate of 51 and 57 was, respectively, achieved. The data were analysed using various non-parametric statistics. The study amongst other things established that UBs and MFIs differ in their opinions on how important secure titles are in the lending process and the nature of the influence they can exert on the final lending decision. It was established that both categories of lenders do regard secure titles as important but whether or not it will influence their decision to accept a given landed property as collateral varies across lender types.     

论农业产业结构调整的政策性金融服务体系

文章基于农业产业结构调整的角度对我国农村金融支持展开研究,通过回顾历史、分析现状总结我国农业产业结构历经5次结构性调整。我国农业产业历次结构性调整虽然取得较大改进及发展,但仍存在不少问题,其中农村金融服务体系存在的问题有:(1)正规金融机构不足、服务效率低下;(2)金融知识渗透性差;(3)抵押物问题;(4)非正规金融风险较大。发现农村政策性金融对产业结构调整的作用主要体现在:(1)农业产业的扶植和政策引导功能;(2)农村和农业的开发功能;(3)农村金融市场和信用体系的完善功能。提出建立健全我国农村政策性金融服务体系的主要措施有:(1)增强教育投入、增加信贷宣传;(2)加大中小额信贷支持力度,提高融资水平;(3)应用"互联网+"金融方式,推进金融服务体系多样化;(4)加大土地政策改革,解决农民抵押物难问题。     

农村集体土地存贷合作社的制度经济学分析:彭墩村的案例研究

研究目的:对土地存贷合作社的运作模式和绩效进行分析,为农村集体土地流转制度创新提供新的思路。研究方法:文献资料法,个案分析法。研究结果:土地存贷合作社的制度创新源于当事人对外部利润的追逐以及由此形成的制度创新的同意一致性,制度的成功运行在于其满足农民集体行动的逻辑。研究结论:土地存贷合作社是符合中国农村土地流转制度创新发展方向的一种制度变迁。     

How has microcredit supported agriculture? Evidence using panel data from Bangladesh

Improving agricultural productivity has received a greater attention in recent years amid concerns about rising food insecurity, population pressures, and climate change. Many believe that better access to institutional credit, spanning microcredit as well as commercial and agricultural banks, can help rural households smooth risks, and access inputs and other technology to modernize agriculture and improve farm/nonfarm linkages. We use recently augmented household panel data spanning over 20 years in Bangladesh to examine the effects of rural credit expansion (both microcredit and formal bank channels) on outcomes for agricultural households. We find that microcredit has benefited households with lower landownings, raising agricultural income from activities such as livestock rearing that require less land, as well as nonfarm income diversification for all households, but with the strongest effect for landless or near‐landless households. We do not find effects of microcredit on crop income, but do, however, find that reported supply‐side credit constraints significantly lower crop income. Borrowing by both men and women has contributed to nonfarm income growth for marginal farmers, but only men's borrowing has contributed to nonfarm income growth among higher landowning groups.     

Land regularization on agricultural frontiers: The case of Northwestern Petén, Guatemala

Land regularization, the provision of state-sanctioned property rights to landowners, is an important development strategy in the Global South. Although much work has examined the effects of regularization in settled rural areas, the effects of this policy on agricultural frontiers are poorly understood. Four benefits of regularization that are predicted for settled rural areas are improved tenure security, increased land-attached investment and credit access, and more efficient land market activity. This study explores the extent to which these benefits accrue to campesino landowners and society in the early years of a regularization project implemented by a non-government organization (NGO) on an agricultural frontier in Petén, Guatemala. Based on semi-structured interviews with landowners from three rural communities in northwestern Petén and discussions with personnel from state agencies and NGOs, this study concludes that the predicted benefits of regularization are strongly constrained by socio-economic and ecological factors in the agricultural frontier region, specifically, the weak connection between legal tenure and de facto tenure security, inadequate markets, high wildfire frequency, unwillingness of banks to supply campesino landowners with formal credit, and the presence of a strong extra-legal land market.     

Land owners’ perception of land consolidation and their satisfaction with the results – Slovenian experiences

Land consolidation has been an important instrument of rural development for over a century throughout Europe. Nowadays, land consolidation can be an integral part of both rural and urban development projects, but the focus of our study is on land consolidation in rural areas. In addition to the efforts aimed at making agriculture and forestry more competitive through a comprehensive reallocation process, improvement of road and drainage networks, landscaping, environmental management, conservation projects, and other functions may be implemented in land consolidation. There are differences in the objectives and procedures of land consolidation among the countries. Beside the formal institutional framework of land consolidation, informal institutions can have a substantial influence on the implementation of land consolidation. In the article, the past experiences in the field of land consolidation in Slovenia are presented, which are still reflected in the limited acceptability of this instrument among land owners. Furthermore, the current institutional (legal) framework is analyzed in detail. The main objective of the research was to investigate the opinion of land consolidation participants about land consolidation. Based on the field survey conducted on a sample of private land owners involved in selected land consolidation projects we tried to define the advantages and disadvantages of the current practice. The main finding is that the active participation of land owners contributes to their comprehension of the aims and to their satisfaction with the results of the land consolidation. It has been shown that the active participation of land owners in the land consolidation is the basis for developing good practices; moreover, it affects the land owners’ perception of land consolidation. The transfer of knowledge and representation of good practices among actors are still needed, in particular because of bad experiences in the past (i.e. enforced and environmentally unfriendly projects) and the traditional emotional attachment to land among land owners. In parallel, there is a great need to provide an optimization of the land consolidation process in Slovenia.     

Credit constraints and productivity in Peruvian agriculture

This article evaluates the performance of a rural credit market in Peru. We develop a model that shows that collateral requirements imposed by lenders in response to asymmetric information can lead not just to quantity rationing but also to transaction cost rationing and risk rationing. Just like quantity rationing, these two additional forms of nonprice rationing adversely affect farm resource allocation and productivity. We test the insights of the model using a panel data set from Northern Peru. We estimate the returns to productive endowments for constrained and unconstrained households using a switching regression model. We find that, consistent with the theory, productivity is independent of endowments for unconstrained households but is tightly linked to endowments for constrained households. We estimate that credit constraints lower the value of agricultural output in the study region by 26%.     

Does China’s ‘increasing versus decreasing balance’ land-restructuring policy restructure rural life? Evidence from Dongfan Village,Shaanxi Province

China’s ‘increasing versus decreasing balance’ land-restructuring policy is an innovative, top-down institutional land reform. Using the case study method, this study reviews the policy by examining its restructuring impacts on rural life. By deconstructing the procedures involved in the transfer of land development rights, we clarify that the economic benefits obtained from the trade of land development rights fund the entire project. Thus, the allocation of these economic benefits plays a pivotal role in restructuring rural living, production and ecology. We further analyze the case of Dongfan in Shaanxi Province, and our results show that approximately 60% of the economic benefit was used to demolish and re-construct settlements for peasants, while less than 25% was reserved for the development of rural industries. This distorted benefit allocation stemmed from the local governments’ pursuit of an increased quota for construction land use, which consequently generated weak impacts on restructuring rural life in Dongfan. Although their living conditions have improved, the outflow of peasants persists, thus producing a second round of village hollowing. The results of the policy indicate a need to pay more attention to rural industrial development in future programs and to examine the possibility for more radical land reforms in China, which could serve as a positive reference for village renewal and poverty alleviation in other countries.     

Livestock and land share contracts in a Hindu society

This article examines factors related to a livestock rental market in western Nepal and assesses whether this market is associated with caste differentiation and land rental market participation. Theoretical models for asset‐rich (i.e., high‐caste) households, rich in land and livestock, and asset‐poor (i.e., low‐caste families) households are presented to provide logical explanations for the existence of a livestock rental market and the synergy between livestock and land rental markets participation. A combination of double hurdle models and bivariate‐ordered probit models were used to test the implications of the models. Consistent with the theoretical models, land‐ and livestock‐rich high‐caste households were more likely to rent out land and/or livestock, whereas land‐ and livestock‐poor and credit constrained low‐caste households were more likely to rent livestock and land from others. Participation in the two markets was positively correlated, indicating a synergistic relationship that may be due to production and transaction costs reducing benefits. Policies that can enhance the allocative efficiency of livestock and land rental markets can improve equity as well as efficiency of land use in Nepal. Provision of livestock credit to land‐poor low‐caste households is also crucially dependent on their access to more long‐term contracts for land.     

土地权利保障对经济社会发展的作用

土地权利的安全保障能有效地促进社会、经济的发展。在发达国家,由于土地私有化、各种经济、法律制度的完善,这种机制运行得相对比较好。而在中国,由于历史、传统、法律方面的各种原因,农民得不到有力的土地权利保障,因此不能有效地促进社会、经济的发展,我国政府还需努力来改善这种状况,中央政府应采取一切手段,特别是法律手段确保农民在家庭承包制下的土地使用权,加强金融市场改革使农民可以方便地借贷资金对土地进行投资,支持土地市场发展,促进土地交易,加大土地执法力度。     

大规模土地确权:非洲的失败与亚洲的成功

通过构建一个包括全球近200个国家和地区的数据库并进行系统分析,总结归纳大规模土地确权的失败教训和成功经验。目前全球仍有约一半的发展中国家缺乏正规的地权制度,已实施确权的发展中国家颁证率大多低于50%。失败教训表现为,传统习俗地权制度的冲突、农民认知及支持不足、确权分配不公导致确权需求不足;基础设施建设落后、实施执行不力、配套制度建设未跟上造成确权有效供给缺乏。成功经验表现为,国家能力建设和充分的前期准备是关键,地方政府的有力执行和顺势调整是保障,广大农民确权认知的加强和支持是基石。制定更为清晰合理的确权目标,采用更加适应当地情况的多样化确权方式,做好法律和组织建设等前期工作,探索城乡建设用地统一市场和农地信贷市场建设,有利于我国确权工作的顺利进行和最终成功。     

Contractual Relations in Agricultural Credit Markets: A Hedonic Pricing Approach with Application to Poland

We present a micro‐econometric analysis of agricultural credit market outcomes in Poland that investigates the relationship between contractual arrangements and interest rates. An innovative theoretical framework based on a hedonic market model is developed. We interpret the factors that influence interest rates as ‘quality’ components of the credit contract. Using unique data allows us to consider both nominal interest rates and additional bank fees. The results show that banks have preferences for particularly liquid types of collateral, whereas they care little about the purpose for which the loan is used. Furthermore, the analysis allows quantification of the effects of socioeconomic attributes of farmers, different lending sources and government subsidies on interest rates. The latter effect is small compared with the officially declared reduction of the nominal interest rate. A simulation shows that enabling more borrowers to use liquid forms of collateral implies lower rates than those obtained by participating in the subsidy programme.