Financial Liberalization and the Agrarian Sector: India and Kenya Compared

The agrarian sector in many developing countries has been going through a phase of slowdown, at times aggravating to a crisis, which has called for serious research and introspection into the policies and policy regimes that underlie their development trajectories. This paper looks at one set of important policies, namely the policies of financial liberalisation and traces its linkages with the agrarian sector. It uses the context of two developing economies, India and Kenya that were married to the idea of development banking in the 1950s and 1960s but have liberalized the economy since then, to understand the impact of financial liberalization on the agrarian sector.