State of Agricultural Finance in India

Agricultural finance has come a long way in the past 15 years. After the concerted efforts of GOI, supported by RBI and NABARD, towards doubling of agricultural credit flow in 2004¬¬¬¬--2005, the growth in credit flow to the sector has been robust with an impressive CAGR of 18% between 2004--2005 and 2019--2020. While outreach increased, the Terms of Trade (Farmers and Non-farmers) has largely been on a declining trend, reflecting the underlying stressed conditions in farming. There is a challenge of inclusion, where small and marginal farmers continue to struggle for suitable and affordable credit products and access. This book summarizes the current state of agricultural finance in India, highlighting policy blind spots and grey areas. It documents the important advancements made in the agri-finance space in the last few years. The book covers various aspects of Agri-Finance Policy; institutional appetite and architecture for agriculture credit; formal financial services for enterprises in agriculture; agri-business, including FPOs; and innovations in credit, insurance, delivery mechanisms for agri-sector.

Research on the Environmental Effect of Green Finance Policy Based on the Analysis of Pilot Zones for Green Finance Reform and Innovations

In this study, taking the pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations set up in 2017 as the objects, a quasi-natural experiment is conducted to assess the environmental effects of green finance policy using the difference-in-difference propensity score matching (PSM-DID) method based on the panel data in 30 provincial-level administrative regions from 2011 to 2019. In addition, further efforts are made to investigate the differences of green financial policies in environmental effect. According to the research findings, the set-up of green finance pilot zones can reduce the environmental pollution, and green finance policy is conductive to environmental enhancement. Meanwhile, a partial mediating effect exists between a region’s innovation capability and industrial structure. On the whole, green finance policy plays the most significant role in improving the eastern region’s environmental pollution, followed by the central region, but barely enhances the environment in the western region. To sum up, the more serious the environmental pollution is, the better the effect of green finance policy.