Rural Financial Markets in Asia: Paradigms, Policies and Performance specifically examines the commercialization of the rural economy and the provision and use of rural financial services since the 1970s.

Until recently the use of agricultural credit as a developmental tool seemed clear and straightforward. Most concerned people believed that increases in the volume of cheap credit were necessary to boost agricultural production, and that the rural poor could be brought into the mainstream of development through supervised credit programs. It seemed that certain ideal types of rural credit institutions offered the promise of meeting farmers' credit needs, and that experience in the industrialized countries with cooperatives and specialized agricultural finance institutions could be effectively transplanted to low-income countries. This collection of readings highlights facets of rural financial markets that have often been neglected in discussions of agricultural credit in developing countries. It moves beyond a narrow concern with the simple provision of credit to a broad consideration of the performance of rural financial markets and of ways to improve the quality and range of financial services for low-income farmers. It reflects new thinking on the design, administration, evaluation and policy framework of rural finance and credit programs in developing countries.

Lack of credit access is severe in low income and poor families that are normally considered to have fewer opportunities to borrow from banks due to insufficient valuable assets for collateral. These low-income households face limited opportunity to acquire new technology and working capital for agricultural production and thus tend to fall behind. As a result, providing access to finance to low-income rural households has been considered an important component of any rural development strategy. Microfinance programmes, in particular, have been gradually embedded in national strategies of many developing countries as they are poverty-focused. They aim to facilitate the access to financial services such as credit for the poor who are usually disadvantaged in terms of access to conventional financial services from formal financial institutions. The objective of this book is to provide an overview of microfinance programmes in Asia focusing in particular on the determinants of the accessibility of rural households to microcredit. The book studies seven Asian countries such as China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh with two specific case studies.

Originally published in 1985, twenty-three chapters are brought together in 4 parts dealing with, respectively, problems in rural finance, interest rate policies, politics and finance, and new directions for rural financial markets. In an introduction it is argued that cheap and abundant credit is often regarded as essential for rural development but that actions taken on the basis of this assumption have given disappointing results. Low-interest policies and the improper use of financial markets are seen as the principal reasons for this. It is recommended that higher and more flexible interest rates are allowed and that little or no attention is given to target loans. Informal lenders are thought to offer valuable services therefore they should not be discouraged. More emphasis should be put on voluntary savings mobilization and access to formal loans by non-farm rural firms. It is concluded that many traditional agricultural credit programmes are counterproductive and that attractive product and input prices together with higher yields would be more powerful in stimulating agricultural development.

We study the effects of a bank's engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, shortterm, capital constrained, and with the ability to generate risk from concentrated positions. When a bank engages in trading, it can use its ‘spare’ capital to profitablity expand the scale of trading. However, there are two inefficiencies. A bank may allocate too much capital to trading ex-post, compromising the incentives to build relationships ex-ante. And a bank may use trading for risk-shifting. Financial development augments the scalability of trading, which initially benefits conglomeration, but beyond some point inefficiencies dominate. The deepending of the financial markets in recent decades leads trading in banks to become increasingly risky, so that problems in managing and regulating trading in banks will persist for the foreseeable future. The analysis has implications for capital regulation, subsidiarization, and scope and scale restrictions in banking.

This book investigates the role of wealth in achieving sustainable rural economic development. The authors define wealth as all assets net of liabilities that can contribute to well-being, and they provide examples of many forms of capital – physical, financial, human, natural, social, and others. They propose a conceptual framework for rural wealth creation that considers how multiple forms of wealth provide opportunities for rural development, and how development strategies affect the dynamics of wealth. They also provide a new accounting framework for measuring wealth stocks and flows. These conceptual frameworks are employed in case study chapters on measuring rural wealth and on rural wealth creation strategies. Rural Wealth Creation makes numerous contributions to research on sustainable rural development. Important distinctions are drawn to help guide wealth measurement, such as the difference between the wealth located within a region and the wealth owned by residents of a region, and privately owned versus publicly owned wealth. Case study chapters illustrate these distinctions and demonstrate how different forms of wealth can be measured. Several key hypotheses are proposed about the process of rural wealth creation, and these are investigated by case study chapters assessing common rural development strategies, such as promoting rural energy industries and amenity-based development. Based on these case studies, a typology of rural wealth creation strategies is proposed and an approach to mapping the potential of such strategies in different contexts is demonstrated. This book will be relevant to students, researchers, and policy makers looking at rural community development, sustainable economic development, and wealth measurement.

This book analyses the functioning of factor markets for agriculture in the EU-27 and several candidate countries.