ABSTRACT
The main objective of this essay is to present some empirical data on savings, capital formation and credit collected in a peasant society, and to show how these data may be employed in support of propositions of interest to economists. Economists have often been charged with being concerned mainly with purely abstract relationships, with developing generalizations from axiomatic assumptions and with analysing situations which have only slight relation to the real world. In the course of this argument it has especially been pointed out that economics, as it was developed in the context of a market economy with emphasis on capitalistic forms of exchange and capital accumulation, has no relevance to simpler peasant economies and that, therefore, a new and distinct set of propositions about the productive and allocative activities of peasant societies must be developed.
