5. Agricultural Credit Policies during Transition
General Observations
An overview of government assistance in CEE countries shows that they have all
introduced many different forms of government intervention into the credit markets.
These range from complete debt right-off’s to credit guarantees. The specific form that
these interventions have taken within each of these countries, have been greatly affected
by their respective general macroeconomic situation, the institutional framework of the
financial systems, and stage of property rights reforms and privatisation. In the
following sub-section we discuss each of the countries policies in-depth, but firstly these
are the main observation to been drawn:
· Most CEE countries are now providing some form of government guarantee
program (see Table 3 and the next section), in hope that these may stimulate the
availability of credit to the sector.
· All of the countries have generally been increasing their levels of agricultural credit
subsides (Figure 2). This is especially true for Poland and the Czech Republic which
have seen marked increases during 1994 and 1995. This may be due to both
countries having seen large increases to gross fixed investment, direct foreign
investment and stabilisation of inflation during those years, thus making it politically
necessary to provide support to the agricultural sector5
.
· A number of the countries have specialist agricultural banks and funds. These have
generally been privatised and been allowed to diversify their loans portfolios into
other sectors of the economy. Many governments still use these banks as their
primary means of allocating short term subsidised credit, but have begun changing
this policy with the introduction of guarantees being channelled through the whole
commercial banking sector.