Book Description

In this thesis, I investigate certain aspects of credit in rural China between 1929 and 1933. Based on the extensive household-level data collected by John Lossing Buck for Land Utilization in China (1937) the purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, I explore factors that influenced Chinese farmers' credit demand, supply and productivity. I include interactions including controls for the very uncertain historical environment facing farmers in the Republican era. Second, I investigate the constraints on access to credit, taking advantage of the data used and model I chose given the data available to me. More specifically, I determine the relationships between special expenditures (Weddings, Funeral, etc.), agricultural production and the demand and supply of credit. The conclusions I get are Chinese formal financial system was far away from complete due to the poor political and natural environment. Formal sources of credit are minuscule; Chinese farmers relied heavily on informal credit channels for consumptive purpose and productive purpose. In most cases from the regressions I run, loan demand increases with productivity; the higher productivity, the greater loan demand will be. For indebted farmers, the correlation between consumptive loan supply and productivity is negative while it is positive between productive loan supply and productivity. From the credit demand function, if there is more consumptive loan supply, there will be more consumptive loan demand; if there is more productive loan supply, and there will be less productive demand. We show that farmers' demand for credit was impacted by their purpose to borrow. From the credit supply function, increase in consumptive loan demand will not increase consumptive loan supply; while if the demand for productive loan demand was greater, the supply will also be higher. The final implications I find are that the more special the expenditure (wedding and funeral expense) the greater was credit demand by farmers (at least those who borrowed). And for those farmer who are not accustomed to living in debt, their decision to borrow or not will not be affected by the happening of wedding or funeral event. Some farmers may suffer great poverty but they still will choose not to borrow. An important conclusion from this study is that, by and large, the Chines farmer was a ratetaker. Our results find in the overwhelming number of cases that the demand was almost, if not, perfectly inelastic. Thus, we find over and over that the greater the demand for credit the higher the interest rate charged. This conclusion comes from the observation that in virtually all models examined, the supply equation had a positive relation between interest rate charged and loan demanded, but the demand equation had no measureable statistical relation between amount borrowed and the interest rate charged. As for production loans, at least some of the models investigated showed a downward, sloping demand for credit, and a positive relationship between credit and agricultural productivity. Finally, this study was based on the actual household data gathered by Professor Buck. Thought lost to history, this data was discovered in 2000 in the archives at Nanjing Agricultural University, and was preserved, and digitized by faculty and students in the College of Economics and Management, Nanjing Agricultural College. This thesis is the first to use this data outside of China, and the only study to investigate agricultural credit. We believe that this is the only study to investigate empirically and statistically the demand and supply of credit in the Republican era. However, we should also mention that not all data was recovered so there is not a perfect match on all variables between our available sample and the summary statistics in Land Utilization in China, although for the most part they are close and very much consistent. ii.