The importance of determining the efficiency of business of agricultural farms in relation to the use of credits in agriculture, the example of the Republic of Serbia

The organization of agricultural production in countries such as the Republic of Serbia should be as close as possible to optimality. This can be achieved in different ways. One of the ways to improve the success and efficiency of business should be seen in the search for the most favorable form of obtaining loans from commercial banks. The paper highlights the importance of analyzing three types of loans, namely: a loan for refinancing intended for agriculture, an investment loan intended for agriculture and a loan for working capital intended for agriculture from the perspective of the efficiency of agricultural operations. A Pearson correlation analysis was performed for the observation period 2021-2022. The main conclusion is that there is a connection between the efficiency of agricultural operations with all three forms of taking loans by agricultural farms on a sample of N =149, that is, the obtained results confirmed this (p<.05). In addition, the study points to the existence of another conclusion, i.e. that the costs related to the taken loans in the observed period have an increase, but they do not have such an impact as the analyzed three forms of loans taken by agricultural holdings, because their impact is in the interval of 0.067 for 2021 to 0.070 in 2022.