Table of Contents | Words: Alphabetical - Frequency - Inverse - Length - Statistics | Help | IntraText Library
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace
Towards a better distribution of land

IntraText CT - Text

  • CHAPTER I PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH THE CONCENTRATION OF LANDHOLDINGS
    • The Credit Market
Previous - Next

Click here to hide the links to concordance

The Credit Market

15. Traditional regulations governing the credit market help to produce the effects described above. Small farmers find it very difficult to gain access to the credit needed to improve production techniques, to expand their holdings and cope with adversities, because of the role given to land as a guarantee, as well as the higher costs that small loans entail for credit institutions.(11)

In rural areas, there is often no legal credit market, so that small farmers have to turn to money-lenders if they need loans, thus exposing themselves to risks that can lead to the partial or even total loss of their land — for property speculation is usually the real focus of such moneylenders' operations. This results in a raking in of smaller properties, swelling both the ranks of the landless and the size of the holdings of large landowners, richer farmers or local traders.

Basically, in poor economies, access to long-term credit tends to be directly proportionate to ownership of production inputs, particularly land, and therefore to be the exclusive prerogative of major landowners.




11) On the close interconnection in most traditional agrarian economies between land ownership, access to credit and distribution of wealth, see: World Bank, World Development Report 1991, pp. 65-66.






Previous - Next

Table of Contents | Words: Alphabetical - Frequency - Inverse - Length - Statistics | Help | IntraText Library

Best viewed with any browser at 800x600 or 768x1024 on Tablet PC
IntraText® (V89) - Some rights reserved by EuloTech SRL - 1996-2007. Content in this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License