Suchergebnisse

The rural poor made especially great strides in the 1970s; unlike earlier decades. Primarily as a result of federal income transfer programs, rural poverty has lost much of its harsh personal impact. Nonetheless, the residual hard core of the poor still exist, being too costly and too difficult to reach.

Farmers, large and small, and the non-farm population in rural
areas all suffer from the liquidity constraint. Credit is needed to
acquire command over the use of working capital, fixed capital, and
consumption goods. The Green Revolution technologies have increased the
credit requirement for modern inputs and farm investment. A new expanded
role of rural credit institutions has emerged in the wake of the
technology revol~tion in rural areas. Two distinct approaches have been
used to provide the financial services to the rural poor. The most
widely favoured approach in the past was the use of subsidised interest
rates with a portion of credit reserved for the poor. The low interest
policy was based on the premise that it would induce farmers, large and
small, to use modern' inputs on a larger scale. One of the adverse
side-effect of this policy was the introduction of an element of
financial unsustainability in the loan portfolios of the credit
institutions. The recent view about the delivery of rural credit
consists of using market interest rates and using a mixture of
'bottom-up initiatives' at the local level, using non-government groups
and 'top-down initiatives' by the formal credit institutions in terms of
the simplification of the procedures and decentralisation of the credit
operation for credit supply to the rural poor. In this paper, an attempt
is made to evaluate the efficacy of these two approaches in the case of
Pakistan for delivering credit to the rural poor.