FINANCIAL LITERACY AND ECONOMIC RESILIENCE IN AGRICULTURE: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW
Abstract
Macro-level agricultural policies often fail because farm households lack the micro-level financial capability to absorb shocks. Adhering to PRISMA guidelines across open-access repositories—including Google Scholar, Dimensions.ai and Lens.org, this systematic review synthesizes global empirical literature published from January 2012 to May 2026. The findings map three distinct pathways to economic resilience. First, ex-ante financial literacy drives a crucial shift away from predatory local moneylenders toward subsidized institutional credit, while lowering cognitive barriers to investing in climate-smart agriculture. Second, ex-post capability helps smallholders navigate complex weather-indexed insurance structures and prevents the distress liquidation of core farm assets during harvest failures. Third, digital financial literacy acts as a high-speed resilience multiplier by helping farmers secure emergency mobile money, verify direct benefit transfers, and monitor transparent market pricing. Despite these benefits, the current literature displays critical analytical gaps. It systematically overlooks real-time cognitive overload during active crises, ignores severe rural infrastructure deficits, and relies too heavily on one-time cross-sectional snapshots. Ultimately, this review offers a new conceptual framework, proving that macro-level capital injections require micro-level financial capability to build genuinely shock-resistant rural economies.
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References
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