Suchergebnisse

The present paper is intended as the background to a more detailed discussion of the facts of agricultural debt adjustment. I propose to discuss briefly the nature and objectives of our machinery of agricultural debt adjustment, the background against which it works, and some of the more important difficulties encountered in practice. The observations are based largely upon experience acquired in the West, although the setting concerns the country as a whole.Problems of debt adjustment are primarily problems in the economics of distribution. Measures taken in this direction affect transfers of income between individuals, groups, and sections of the country. Their chief objective is to relieve the pressure on exposed groups and to allay the tensions created thereby. They constitute a part of the machinery of adjustment so essential in an economy subject to extreme variation of income and afflicted with rigidities which obstruct or divert forces tending to equilibrium. The tendency has been to concentrate upon the economics of the long run and to ignore obstacles to the free play of such forces. The importance of these obstacles is most manifest in the lower phases of the business cycle, and the presence of corrective or compensatory measures is in large part due to the cumulative effects of the inflexibility characteristic of a continental type of development and to the difficulty of planning for an economy in which variability is so marked. The results are seen in a wide range of expedients of which debt adjustment is an example. Difficulties arise owing to the failure to distinguish between social and pecuniary costs, to the widely different interpretations of what the term "justice" implies, and to differences in points of view which range from an insistence upon a strictly legal interpretation of rights and obligations to demands for debt reductions upon the basis of present income.