Credit access and utilization in agriculture and aquaculture in the Ayeyarwady delta

Myanmar has one of the least developed financial systems in the world and poor access to credit is widely believed tobe a major constraint to investment and productivityimprovements in agriculture. This brief presents analysis ofdata from the Myanmar Aquaculture-Agriculture Survey(MAAS) on access to and use of credit in agriculture andaquaculture. MAAS was implemented in May 2016, with1100 households in two “clusters” of village tracts inAyeyarwaddy and Yangon regions, selected for their highrespective concentrations fish farms and paddy farms. Ouranalysis describes the access to, and conditions andutilization of formal agricultural loans from the MyanmarAgricultural Development Bank (MADB), loans from othersources utilized in agriculture and aquaculture, andcommunity-level data on access to credit used for generalpurposes.