Those persons employed in this nation's agribusiness industry can ill afford to ignore the balance sheet for U.S. agriculture. Preliminary estimates for 1983 suggest that production agriculture currently functions on a base of debt capital totaling $215 billion. While total assets employed have, since 1980, remained almost constant at about $1,000 billion, our farmers' equity position has actua...

A general theory is developed to analyze the efficiency and income distribution effects of a biofuel consumer tax credit and the interaction effects with a price contingent farm subsidy. Using the U.S. ethanol market as a stylized example, ethanol prices rise above the gasoline price by the amount of the tax credit. Corn farmers therefore gain directly while gasoline consumers only gain from an...

the study was designed to investigate the comparative analysis of agricultural credit users and non-users among cassava farmers in ohafia local government area of abia state. a sample of 50 credit users and 50 non-credit user cassava-based farmers were selected by multistage random sampling technique. data were collected with a well structured questionnaire administered to a total of 100 random...

This paper explores the relationship between credit and index insurance market development using a theoretical model in which small farm households have the option to either (i) adopt a capital-intensive technology that is risky but high-yielding, or (ii) self-insure by adopting a traditional low-input and low-yielding technology. We show that neither market is likely to develop in isolation fr...

We show empirically using panel data at the plot and farm level and based on a model incorporating supervision costs, risk, credit-market imperfections and scale-economies associated with mechanization that small-scale farming is inefficient in India. Larger farms are more profitable per acre, more mechanized, less constrained in input use after bad shocks, and employ less per-acre labor than s...

Many U.S. states imposed temporary moratoria on farm and nonfarm residential mortgage foreclosures during the Great Depression. This article describes the conditions that led some states to impose these moratoria and other mortgage relief during the Depression and discusses the economic effects. Moratoria were more common in states with large farm populations (as a percentage of total state pop...