The role of agricultural sectors in the economic development of a country is undeniable, especially in developing and least-developed ones, ensuring food supply, increasing national income, export earnings and poverty reduction. Vietnam is known as an emerging market, depending directly on agriculture-related activities for their livelihood, in which the issue of rural credit access still remains a confounding problem. The paper focuses on identifying the determinants of credit access in rural areas of Vietnam using Haiphong city as a case study, including formal and informal credit. The paper uses data collected from a survey of 180 rural households in a district of Haiphong city. The probit and linear regression models are applied to investigate the factors that determine household credit accessibility, i.e., the household’s decision to borrow and borrowing amounts. Results of this analysis reveal the different significant determinants of formal and informal credit market access. Group membership and connection are found to have significantly strong impacts on formal credit accessibility while informal credit access is strongly influenced by agriculture income and dependency ratio. The implications of these findings for enhancing formal credit accessibility and decreasing the dependence on informal markets are discussed.

Access to credit for businesses is an unresolved issue, especially in developing countries and transition economies. There has been a lot of research exploring factors affecting firms’ credit accessibility. Particularly, factors related to borrowers and lenders are always placed under consideration. However, besides those factors, institutional elements could also play an important role in guiding companies’ operations. In countries where the economy lacks transparency and low-level development is limited, informal institutional factors can have potential impacts. In this paper, we focus on exploring the relationship between firm–government links and credit access, thereby offering managerial implications through utilizing cross-sectional data sets at the firm level, with an initial sample of 26,849 observations from 38 countries at different levels of development around the world. The results show a positive correlation of firm–government connection with credit access. Moreover, this relationship may vary depending on the market in which the business primarily operates. Specifically, firms working internationally are less influenced by links with governments and tend to rely more on their own characteristics and conditions.