Indebtedness and Liquidity in Agriculture: A Long-term Sectoral Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Being indebted and the liquidity shortfalls could be the base for recreating debt in the circumstances of unavailable trade credit. Accessing to bank credit or other liabilities is rather a function of liquidity for all types of businesses. Excluding equities, we hereby aim to reveal a sectoral evidence by the help of other liabilities side contributors and liquidity indicators on to what extend a firm regenerates debt in the long-run depending on the general liquidity criteria. Therefore, we try to explore a sector specific long-term evidence on the agriculture sector in Turkey. The real sector statistics feed the study in terms of data. Data curation consists of calculating data series as averages of three years aggregate balance sheet totals in the agriculture sector of Turkey for the time span of 1996 and 2016. The methodology follows a path as testing regressions for the variables, presenting interchangeably significant results, affirming the assumptions of the regressions, tests on unit root and cointegration along with causalities. The findings of the study confirm self-creating reasons of being indebted with the impact of liquidity. The study represents three models which have total debt to total assets ratio, short-term bank credits to short-term liabilities ratio, and long-term bank credits to total assets ratio as dependent variables respectively. We have analyzed the effects of current ratio, acid-test or quick ratio and cash and cash equivalents ratio which are listed as leading liquidity indicators. Cash and cash equivalents and current ratio have been found significant on the liabilities in the early trials of regressive test models. However, except current ratio liquidity indicators all together failed in predicting. The results eventually confirm the importance of eminent liquidity criteria, both current ratio and acid-test ratio are significant on the selected variables of liabilities as an evidence for the agriculture sector of Turkey in the long-run. Nevertheless, acid-test ratio has rather strong and enduring effects. Since cash and cash equivalents have been determined as stationary at a different level, they could therefore have insignificant impact on being indebted for longer periods than time span of the study. Yet the creditors would better not to directly add a liquidity indicator in their decision process of creditability in a sector. Nonetheless, the novelty of the study also ensures that predicting total debt and bank credits of both short and long run might require the same liquidity indicators along with other liability side contributors which do not necessarily or directly consider the shareholders’ equities in a sector specific atmosphere.