Determinants of farming households' access to agricultural credit in the central region of Thailand with special reference to land title | |
| Author | Soontaree Sakprachawut |
| Call Number | AIT Diss. no.AS-18-01 |
| Subject(s) | Agricultural credit--Thailand Land titles--Registration and transfer--Thailand |
| Note | A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Agricultural Systems and Engineering |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Abstract | Credit plays a vital role in developing countries. In particular, the use of credit allows poor households to engage and invest in new activities and eventually improve their livelihoods. In the agricultural sector, lack of capital is a constraint to improve smallholder farmers’ productivities. Credit allows farming households to borrow against future income to purchase inputs or to invest in new equipment and machinery for improving their land and labor productivity. In Asia, farmers can obtain loans from both the informal and formal financial sectors. In Thailand, land plays a vital role in the agricultural development as an important source of production and generation of farmers’ income. Land title is also one of the factors influencing farmers’ access to credit in the formal credit markets. Thailand farmers use credit to undertake agricultural production, particularly during the pre-harvest season. Loans required for these reason are normally obtained from informal sectors as these loans are easily and quickly processed without the need for collateral security and less paper work. In recent years, smallholder farmers in Thailand are facing problems and constraints. The most important problems are the lack of capital for farm production and the poor access to markets. These tend to put small farmers at a disadvantage in a competitive market. In general, most of the smallholder farmers do not have the collateral security demanded by formal financial institutions; they continue to obtain credit from the informal credit markets with higher interest rates compared to those of the formal credit markets. In order to improve farmers’ access to sufficient, timely and low cost credit from formal credit markets, it is imperative to examine determinants of access to credit from the formal credit markets, with special reference to the effect of land title, as land title can be used as collateral security by the smallholder farmers to obtain loans from formal financial markets. This thesis examined the effects of land title and farmers’ characteristics on their participation in the formal credit markets in a land reform area of Thailand. Data was collected from 218 farm households in one land reform area of central region of Thailand and were analyzed using a generalized double hurdle model to assess the factors influencing the likelihood of farming households to access credit and the size of the credit from a formal credit institution, the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives (BAAC). The empirical results revealed that the absence of a title, whether fully or partially transferable, decreases significantly the participation in the formal credit market and the size of the loans. However, this effect was small. The findings also indicate that the farm assets, gender of the head of the household, age, and the labor force per hectare significantly influenced the probability of participation as well as the amount borrowed. The possibility given to farmers having title with partial transferability to provide alternative types of guarantees reduced the gap in loan-taking between the different types of land title. This implies that the presence of a land title, transferable or not, had a significant influence on farmers demand and success in obtaining credit from formal financial institutions. |
| Year | 2018 |
| Type | Dissertation |
| School | School of Environment, Resources, and Development |
| Department | Department of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources (Former title: Department of Food Agriculture, and BioResources (DFAB)) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Agricultural Systems and Engineering (ASE) |
| Chairperson(s) | Kuwornu, John K. M.;Shrestha, Rajendra Prasad (Co-Chairperson) |
| Examination Committee(s) | Jourdain, Damien;Datta, Avishek |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperative (MOAC), Thailand |
| Degree | Thesis (Ph.D.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2018 |