Institutional versus non-institutional credit to agricultural households in India: Evidence on impact from a national farmers’ survey

Anjani Kumar, Ashok Mishra (ashok.k.mishra@asu.edu), Sunil Saroj and P.K. Joshi

Economic Systems, 2017, vol. 41, issue 3, 420-432

Abstract: A goal of agricultural policy in India has been to reduce farmers’ dependence on informal credit. To that end, recent initiatives are focused explicitly on rural areas and have a positive impact on the flow of agricultural credit. Despite the significance of the above initiatives in enhancing the flow of institutional credit to agriculture, the links between institutional credit and net farm income and consumption expenditures in India are not very well documented. Using large, national farm household level data and IV 2SLS estimation methods, we investigate the role of institutional farm credit on farm income and farm household consumption expenditures. Findings show that, in India, formal credit does indeed play a critical role in increasing both net farm income and per capita monthly household expenditures of Indian farm families. Finally, we find that, in the presence of formal credit, social safety net programs like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) may have unintended consequences. In particular, MGNREGA reduces both net farm income and per capita monthly household consumption expenditures. On the other hand, in the presence of formal credit, the Public Distribution System may increase both net farm income and per capita monthly household consumption expenditures.

Keywords: Institutional credit; Instrumental variable; 2SLS; Net farm income; Consumption expenditures; Social safety net (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S093936251730050X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecosys:v:41:y:2017:i:3:p:420-432

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecosys.2016.10.005

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Systems is currently edited by R. Frensch

More articles in Economic Systems from Elsevier Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).