Ex ante subsidized rates estimate in rural credit from 1981 to 2005

Abstract

Rural credit played a relevant role in the development of Brazilian agriculture. However, the historical evolution of the amount of official resources aimed at farmers showed a sharp decrease since the late 1970s. One of the reasons for this reduction was the subside in this type of credit, which became unsustainable before the restrictions of the Brazilian economy. Literature shows that this high subside volume was intentionally provoked by the policy enforced at the time. This work has the objective of verifying whether there was an explicit subside policy via referential interest rates, or it was overpaid ex post. The main indicative of the study is that the overpaid subside is the result of the unpredicted acceleration of the inflationary process in Brazil during the second half of the last century. The analysis of this problem will make it possible for other studies about the rural credit policy to be carried out from a different perspective than the one predominating in literature. In this new perspective, subsides would be at least partly the result of unpredictability and instability of the macroeconomic scenario and not a solution clearly determined by the rural credit policy in Brazil. The results found in this study led to this indicative of subsidized credit policy due to the inflationary process not foreseen by inflation forecasts. Inflation forecasts were lower in most of the analyzed period, provoking a lower interest rate than the one expected. We conclude that the rural credit program was overpaid subsidized due to the uncontrolled inflation in the country.