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Abstract Access to rural credit has been persistently heterogeneous across Brazilian regions over time. This work aimed to estimate the regional effects of rural credit on agricultural production due to the heterogeneity observed in access to credit. Based on data from the 2017 Agricultural Census and climate variables, the effect of rural credit was estimated by standard regressions, combined with the entropy balancing technique. The results show positive and significant effects of rural credit on Brazilian agricultural production, even after controlling for observed covariates. This result was consistent even after balancing the covariates with regard to entropy. The effect of rural credit proved to be heterogeneous across Brazilian regions, being positive and significant for regions with greater access to rural credit and statistically null in less credit-intensive regions. Furthermore, estimates show that technical assistance is an important transmission mechanism of the rural credit effect.

Copyright of Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural is the property of Sociedade Brasileira de Economia e Sociologia Rural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural is the property of Sociedade Brasileira de Economia e Sociologia Rural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using 791 consistent households in the balanced panel, comprising 3,985 households in the unbalanced panel–from a nationally representative, multipurpose, five-round (1988, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2014) Mahabub Hossain Panel Data in Bangladesh—we provide evidence for the long-term impact of different rural credit sources—which include formal banks, quasiformal microfinance institutes, and informal channels—on household welfare indicators. We find that the long-term impact of access to rural credit on a few welfare indicators is statistically insignificant and sometimes negative. This finding mostly holds when we investigate the impact of different rural credit sources separately. Our results raise a question on the progressive lending of some credit sources, especially microfinance institutes, and have implications for the introduction of nationwide credit bureaus in Bangladesh.

Rice agriculture provides millions of households with a steady source of income and employment. However, for small and marginal farmers, the exorbitant cost of production inputs presents a formidable obstacle in their pursuit of acquiring it. Credit constraints are a significant impediment to the adoption of agricultural technologies. Therefore, this paper identifies the determinant of access to rural credit and its impact on Boro rice production technology adoption in Bangladesh using cross-sectional data. The study employed probit regression, propensity score matching (PSM), inverse probability weighting (IPW), and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) techniques. The findings indicate that age, family size, working members, and involvement in safety net programs negatively and significantly influence access to rural credit, while earning persons in the family, literacy, rice farming experience, remittance, and total income positively influence access to rural credit. The positive and significant ATT values suggested that access to rural credit has a positive and significant effect on technology adoption and the level of technology use. It was also found that access to rural credit has a heterogeneous effect. In particular, non-government organization (NGO) credit has a more significant impact on technology adoption than formal bank credit. Access to credit and the adoption of agricultural technologies can be greatly improved with the help of a location-specific rural credit policy and strong monitoring from the formal banking sector.

ABSTRACT: Agriculture is central in Brazil’s political and socioeconomic history; agricultural exploitation is mainly conducted by families, creating a type of agriculture developed in small rural properties named family farming. In Brazil, family farming accounts for a very diverse group of businesses, of which 91% of all the establishments are family establishments that build different production strategies according to different degrees of potentiality and precariousness. This study evaluated the role of rural credit policies in developing family farming activities with agricultural income generation in northeastern Brazil on various family-based farms. For this, the authors conducted a case study in Pernambuco, analyzing the spatial relationship between the distribution of family farms and the access to credit resources from the National Program to Strengthen Family Farming from 2006 to 2017 and the change probabilities in types of farms considering the next 10 years, given the maintenance of conditionsreported in the analyzed period. Results indicatedthe weakening of productive potentiality of farming activities in family farms in Pernambuco, with a significant change in the distribution of family farm types, a reduction in the participation of Specialized Farms and an expressive growth of Farms with Rural Residents. The findings also indicated the relevance of access to rural credit in the supply of production needs of different family farm types and development of farming activities with income generation.

This review aims to assess the variability in empirical research conducted on the assertion that access to credit is an exceptional way to overcome some of the financial obstacles associated with contract farming adoption by farmers. Numerous studies have examined how credit access increases the adoption of agricultural technology at the national level. However, because the researchers' findings are heterogeneous, their applicability at the national level is limited. The random effects model showed that access to credit increases farmers’ contract farming adoption by 1.76 units compared to farmers with no access to credit. Additionally, the results of the meta-analysis revealed that the weighted average of the effect sizes in the studies was 40.01%. This indicates that access to credit encourages smallholder farmers to use different agricultural technologies and high-yielding varieties through contract farming. It recommends significant improvements from the government to encourage contract farming and facilitate credit access to assist smallholder farmers in rural areas.

Rural credit policies have a strong impact on food production and food security. The attribution of credit policies to agricultural production is one of the main problems preventing the guarantee of agricultural expansion. In this work, we conduct family typology analysis applied to a set of research data to characterize different regions. Through genetic programming, a model was developed using user-defined terms to identify the importance and priority of each criterion used for each region. Access to credit results in economic growth and provides greater income for family farmers, as observed by the results obtained in the model for the Sul region. The Nordeste region indicates that the cost criterion is relevant, and according to previous studies, the Nordeste region has the highest number of family farming households and is also the region with the lowest economic growth. An important aspect discovered by this research is that the allocation of rural credit is not ideal. Another important aspect of the research is the challenge of capturing the degree of diversity across different regions, and the typology is limited in its ability to accurately represent all variations. Therefore, it was possible to characterize how credit is distributed across the country and the main factors that can influence access to credit.