Concluding Remarks
This article has reviewed some arguments associating market failures with
the case for interventions in rural credit markets. Enforcement difficulties, imperfect information, protection of depositors, market power, and learning arguments all have implications for government intervention.
Where enforcement is an issue, governments may intervene by strengthening
property rights to increase the scope and effectiveness of collateral, although
this is not a direct intervention in the credit market. But government might be
as much a part of the problem as the solution in this context, because many
government-backed credit schemes fail to sanction delinquent borrowers.
Deposit insurance is an obvious option for protecting depositors, but it may
blunt the incentives depositors have to monitor the performance of lenders.
Measures intended to facilitate the flow of funds across groups and regions
may be preferable to deposit insurance schemes.
Monopoly power may create tension because information is concentrated in
lenders' hands, but market power (for example, of village moneylenders) is not
necessarily socially inefficient, even though its redistributive consequences may
be considered repugnant. Providing credit alternatives may be a reasonable response from the perspective of distributional concerns but, again, might have
relatively little to do with market failure.
In summary, there may be good arguments for intervention, and some may
be based on market failure. But as one unpacks each argument, the realization
grows that, given the current state of empirical evidence on many relevant
questions, it is impossible to be categorical that an intervention in the credit
markets is justified. Empirical work that can speak to these issues is the next
challenge if the theoretical progress on the operation of rural credit markets is
to be matched by progress in the policy sphere.