El microcrédito antes de las cooperativas: pósitos y crédito público agrario en España en vísperas de la Gran Guerra

The economic development literature has highlighted the importance of microcredit institutions in providing cheap credit to farmers in poor countr ies or regions. In the Spanish case, the pósitos, village grain banks found throughout most of the countr y, played this role for centuries. This article, using government reports of 1912 to 1914, not only attempts to measure the success of these village organizations, but also the problems to adapt them to the needs of modern agriculture. We show that the pósitos could be ver y impor tant at the local level, restricting the development of cooperatives, but that they could not take deposits, and lacked an organizational structure to create networks or federations.